Old Plays in Manhattan

Macbeth did not strikingly differ as a production from the Old Vic's competent, rather than brilliant, Richard II and Romeo and Juliet. But it so much more powerfully reverberated as a play as to offer greater rewards. And much of its strength lay in what had been the earlier productions' weakness--the title roles: despite limitations, Macbeth and his lady made a striking pair.

Any competent Macbeth may be expected to convey the rushing theater, the rising drama of the first three acts and the intense poetry of almost all the play. The Old Vic did both things and something more. It communicated what is so ominous, so Oedipus-like, in the prophecies that by seeming to shield Macbeth from Nemesis only speed him toward it. And it caught the play's feudal, barbaric, night-lighted atmosphere, the sense of a haunted world no less than a haunted man.

At such harder tasks as countering the terrific fourth-act drop in pressure, or achieving truly tragic stature for Macbeth, the production failed. Paul Rogers' Macbeth was a heroic enough figure of evil, and at moments a man of intense, Hamlet-like imagination. But the difference between the two men that Saintsbury noted--that Macbeth can never leave off whereas Hamlet can never begin, so that Macbeth is increasingly ruthless and consistently unremorseful--is what makes Macbeth not easily tragic. Rogers could not convey what might make him so: an awful sense of alienation, of that

Honor, love, obedience, troops of friends I must not look to have;

of the hideous price, even should he succeed.

Coral Browne's Lady Macbeth also lacked depth, and failed in the sleepwalking scene. Yet, if theatrical, she was often commandingly so. And the two together went far beyond mere partnership in crime. Theirs was a fierce connubial bond that helped humanize a woman who all but lacks humanity and a man who all but loses it.

Major Barbara, on any basis of talent, is certainly major Shaw. Seldom was G.B.S. so fertile and brilliant--though he seldom so needed to be. For here the tireless showman who put on this mask and that, turned to this side or the other, came closest to a complete about-face. Here, in exalting a great munitions-maker, Socialist Shaw fired, as never so fiercely again, on his own ranks. The real weakness of Major Barbara is not that Shaw went ideologically into reverse, but that he went intellectually clean off the road.

The play's essential conflict, or confrontation, is no less vital than it is fascinating. Opposed to the Salvation Army's idealistic, intransigent Barbara, a saver of souls, is her hardheaded munitions-making father, Andrew Undershaft, a destroyer of bodies. But the savers of souls, Barbara learns, are kept in funds by the destroyers of bodies. She further learns that her Merchant-of-Death father is an absolutely model boss, who regards poverty as the greatest of crimes and to thousands has proved a Bringer of Life.

Undershaft's moral value does not stop with his offering one of the most trenchant of all indictments of poverty. It lies also in his demonstrating the folly of all absolute positions, in his showing how good and evil must always jostle and even beget one another. But Shaw, with his new non-reformer's zeal, turns extremist.

It is not just that where he once had the brothel-keeping Mrs. Warren's daugh ter break with her mother, he has the munitions-making Undershaft's daughter end up blowing kisses at her father. It is not that he should make Undershaft not only no villain but a charmer. It is that he should make him not only a charmer but a hero. It is that he should suggest that the best way to keep half the world well-fed is to blow up the other half.

Whatever the logic of it, it makes a decidedly good show. Major Barbara is full of marvelous ideological eye-foolers and glittering intellectual pinwheels and dialectical tugs of war. Beyond that, Shaw has mingled bright drawing-room chatter with sharp cockney unpleasantries, thrown in here an amusing upper-clawss idiot, there a bellowing lower-class bully.

The most dazzling facet of the new production is Charles Laughton's performance as Undershaft. He is as suave, smiling, easy of manner as he is pointed and cutting in effect. And given Shaw's fireworks, he contrives no histrionics. As the play's director, on the other hand, he has invented as many tricks of staging as has Shaw of thought. For a while the two showmen get in each other's way, though eventually they set each other off. This is partly owing to an accomplished cast, including Glynis Johns, Burgess Meredith and Eli Wallach, who particularly scores as Bill Walker. Played straight, this Major Barbara might have been better. But there was never the sense, as of late with other Shaw, that it urgently needed to be.

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