New Play in Manhattan

The Love of Four Colonels (by Peter Ustinov) does something to brighten a dun-colored season, but not much to fur ther the dramatic art. The first play of London's precocious, prolific Peter Ustinov to appear on Broadway, a play is precisely what Four Colonels cannot be called. In essence it is a series of parodies set inside a framework of fantasy; and like most jokes that last all evening, it would far better keep earlier hours. But Playwright Ustinov at his best is witty and at his next-best rather gay, and Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer are sometimes helpful where he is not.

The play introduces four army colonels --U.S., British, French and Russian--in a disputed zone in postwar Germany. Seated round a table, they spar with one another while the playwright spoofs them all. But politics is only the appetizer; the main course is sex. Enter now the good and bad angels of the four men, to conduct them to a neighboring castle where the Sleeping Beauty lies. Each man shall have a chance to wake and win her with a kiss, and each may choose his own ideal time and place for the trial. Having kidded the colonels, Ustinov now kids their national drama. The Sleeping Beauty is wooed in vain in a French period comedy, an Elizabethan verse-play, a languid bit of Chekhov, a Hollywood melodrama.

These playlets let the two stars caper at will, with Rex Harrison providing some brilliant bits while Lilli Palmer exerts her lure in all wigs and weathers. If Ustinov's talent wobbles, his tone remains fixed: as both satire and fantasy, the play is always fizz and never highfalutin.

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