New Play in Manhattan

Venus Observed (by Christopher Fry) shows the author of The Lady's Not for Burning enmeshed in the bright, shiny seaweed of his own talents. Venus is a play about love and a philandering English duke who decides to settle down by choosing a bride from his long line of former mistresses. But he is smitten by his estate manager's fair young daughter, and loses her in the end to his son.

Love would dominate Venus if language did not drench it. Language is Fry's own true love, and Venus catches the glow of poetry, the mocking glints of parody, the flashing of rhetoric and the shimmer of wit. Amid such a tangle of traffic lights, traffic itself snarls, detours and halts. In The Lady's Not for Burning, with its medieval echoes and broomstick leaps of witchcraft and romance, Fry could be simultaneously prankster and poet, could spoof the very verse he spouted. But Venus Observed is modern, sophisticated, drawing-room bred, .and its ironies, at times, stare down its extravagancies as arrant trespassers.

There are many charming speeches and effects; there are bright stunts like a slowly uncoiling sentence 293 words long. But on the stage the play lacks pace and flow, the detail eats up the design. Venus is none the better for Sir Laurence Olivier's irresolute staging, which leaves most of the cast uncharacterized and even Lilli Palmer living entirely off charm. The splendid exceptions are Rex Harrison as the duke and John Williams as the estate manager. Fry, in his own words, is here coruscating on thin ice; and he has forgotten Emerson's warning that in skating on thin ice, "our safety is in our speed."

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