New Play in Manhattan

A Sleep of Prisoners (by Christopher Fry; produced by Luther Greene) is staged in the U.S., as it was in England, in a church (TIME, May 28). The setting and the resonant acoustics of Manhattan's St. James' Church are well suited to Playwright Fry's religious allegory; the actors (three of them from the original British cast) have mastered that rare trick of speaking poetry as though they meant it. But the play itself is another of those allegorical wastelands and wildernesses that the life of the times has imposed upon its literature.

Fry's own symbol is a prison: his characters, actual prisoners of war housed in a church, are hardly less prisoners of self--of their own fears, guilts, aggressions. Even among themselves there is dissension: the play has hardly begun before hot-tempered Private David King is at cynical Private Peter Abie's throat. Then the men settle down for the night, and each in succession has a Biblical dream that reveals his secret self and his ideas of his comrades.

Meadows, submissive, uninvolved and the oldest of the four prisoners, dreams of Cain and Abel--the general human spectacle of brother murdering brother. But violent David King in his dream is King David clashing with Absalom; and scoffing, self-pitying Peter Able is Isaac being led to slaughter. Finally Corporal Adams, the responsible man seeking light and truth, sees David, Peter and himself as Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, all cast into the fiery furnace, all sharing--and surviving--a fearful ordeal:

Strange how we trust the powers that

ruin, And not the powers that bless.

And Meadows, in the dream, answers:

Good . . .

Grows, and makes, and bravely Persuades, beyond all tilt of wrong: Stronger than anger, wiser than strategy . . .

A Sleep of Prisoners is more austere than anything Fry has written; an inquiry into--and seemingly away from--spiritual desolation. But it lacks the strong simple current, the climactic movement, of religious and dramatic emotion alike. It has none of the widening allegoric vision of a Langland or a Bunyan. For one thing, each dream is really a self-enclosed characterization, so that the play has no organic development. By putting Adams' affirmative dream last, Fry allows it to point his moral, but not in dramatic terms: it is either Adams talking to himself, or Fry talking to the audience.

Fry's method is as difficult as his meaning. Readers of Fry's play have time to wrestle with both, but audiences do not. The play's shifting focus makes for a confusing psychological kaleidoscope rather than any clear philosophic light. And even at its soberest, Fry's seems a gift better suited to violin cadenzas than sustained organ music, to ladies who, in the end, are not for burning than to men actually thrust into the fiery furnace.

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