New Plays in Manhattan

Separate Tables (by Terence Rattigan) brings quicksilver to a Broadway season still lacking in blood. A big London hit, Separate Tables is as much stunt as drama in effect, as much production as play in appeal. The author of The Winslow Boy and 0 Mistress Mine has written two short plays with a shared background --a small, drab, English seaside hotel--and a recurrent roster of guests. In passing from one play to the other, only the two leading players, Margaret Leighton and Eric Portman--and they vary garishly--have new roles.

In Table by the Window they are a once-married couple who meet again after having messed up each other's lives. She is now a desperately chic, a self-seeking but unsought woman who might have married millions but is reduced to modeling and drugs. He, a once tough, talented proletarian who might have been a Labor cabinet minister, is reduced to penny-alining and drink. In Table Number Seven Actor Portman is a natty fraud who has largely invented a dashing military past and a sexually timid duffer who has been pinched for molesting women in cinemas. Actress Leighton is an angular, sniffiy spinster who loves the fraud whom her dragon of a mother exposes and tries to expel.

In both plays Rattigan sounds a like theme--expressed in the symbolism of separate tables--of the awful aloneness, the need for others, of the down-at-heel and down-at-heart. But otherwise, there is a sharp contrast between two lives badly lived and two not lived at all, and a glorious opportunity, on the stars' part, for virtuoso acting. Actor Portman changes as brilliantly from an enraged but powerless bull to a neatly clipped but bleating, lamb as does Actress Leighton from a hard, sick, glossy siren to a sick, quivering dowd. And, as staged by Peter Glenville, both productions are consistently adroit theater, full of gaudy character acting and authoritative ensemble playing.

Barring a certain garrulity, Playwright Rattigan has done his full share--in characterization and atmosphere, in sharp touches and emotional scenes--to make such stunt-writing prosper. Indeed, his vivid theater sense is a little disastrously triumphant. There are times when the first drama seems more than arrant make-believe, seems concerned with truth. Unfortunately, Playwright Rattigan has never had the courage of his conceptions, and here--as in The Deep Blue Sea--he wobbles into a miserable happy ending. And in the second play, where he might seem to be protesting against much that is amiss in English life, he emerges an example of much that is amiss with English playwriting: the engines are reversed, the sentimental faucets turned full on. Writers, too, have need of others, of the comforting arms of the public; but the artist's independence of stance, his solitary, separate-table vision, is his one source of lasting power. For him not to sup alone is almost certainly to sup with the Devil.

The Best House In Naples (adapted from the Italian of Eduardo de Filippo by F. Hugh Herbert) was the fourth play during October--normally a well-mannered and even patrician theater month --to set Broadway's teeth on edge. Like the other three, it promptly folded. A tale about a painter's bordello-bred mistress who after 23 years tricks him into marrying her, only to produce three grown-up sons, just one of whom--and she won't say which--is the painter's, The Best House in Naples quickly became as nonsensical and tedious as from the outset it was vulgar.

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