Old Play In Manhattan

The Constant Wife (by Somerset Maugham) still seems very pleasant after 25 years. It gets by no means the right production; it is certainly not topnotch Maugham. But it starts, weaknesses and all, beyond the point where most popular comedy leaves off.

Maugham is Britain's last playwright with Restoration blood in his veins. It is very cold blood; feeling curdles the comedy of manners. It can tingle at naughtiness, but it treats sex as a springboard rather than a swimming pool. Maugham's Constance Middleton can pretend ignorance of her husband's affair with her best friend, can lie to save them when the other husband learns the truth. And--for all that she and Middleton have fallen amiably out of love--she will not herself take a lover until she earns a living, is no more in wifely debt financially than emotionally.

The play wanders through a whole drawing-room world of deception and self-deception, of complacent male stupidity and bland female betrayal. The wit less dazzles than disconcerts, as in the Maugham test of true love: "Could you use his toothbrush?" But The Constant Wife, in any case, is less a triumph of wit than of tone.

The play holds up, despite several performers who cannot act in drawing-room comedy, one or two others who cannot act at all. As Constance, Katharine Cornell is engagingly Candida-like, but she substitutes charm for lightness, good nature for irony. Only Veteran Grace George, as Miss Cornell's worldly-wise Victorian mother, achieves the right worldly-wise Restoration urbanity.

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