Old Play in Manhattan

The Sacred Flame (by Somerset Maugham) is something Maugham ought never to have written. Even in 1928, when it may have aired a bolder problem, it must have seemed a singular problem play. As a matter of fact, it is a sort of drawing-room problem whodunit, concocted of about equal parts Wilde, Pinero and Agatha Christie, doused with platitudes, and served up half-cold.

Maugham tells of a young Englishman, smashed up for life in a plane accident, whose devoted wife and brother have fallen passionately in love and are having an affair. The hopeless cripple providentially dies--only for the nurse suddenly to insist that he was murdered. The rest of the play, while tracking down the not very elusive killer, seeks to justify both the adultery and (as it happens) the mercy killing.

Maugham clearly believed in what he belabored--so clearly that The Sacred Flame comes off much less problem than sermon. There must, after all, be two sides to any really dramatic problem play. This one is not only too one-sided, but is so unheated by life and emotion that Maugham had to keep it going as a rather pallid murder mystery.

Worst of all, by using the formal rhythms of artificial comedy to set forth solemn cliches, The Sacred Flame comes off stilted prose rather than human talk, while the production deals in statuary rather than people. Maugham is a naturally neat writer; but the neatness, here, is that of an inferior toupee.

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