New Plays in Manhattan

The Potting Shed further establishes Graham Greene's position in the theater. Like Greene's The Living Room, The Potting Shed is more trenchant than artistically rounded, but the feeling it leaves, as not many stage works do, is that the playwright is more important than the playwriting. Just as Greene's conversion to Roman Catholicism has crucially conditioned the substance of both plays, so, from his coming late to the theater, both plays suffer in form from a novelist's conditioning. But the religious motive involves a deeply serious, perturbed and constantly probing man, and the technical flaws cannot defeat a naturally brilliant storyteller.

The Potting Shed is that most truly dramatic of detective stories, a what-done-it, a shadowy trek backward from an effect to a cause. James Callifer is divorced from a wife who loved him, is unwelcome in his implacably rationalist family. Incapable of loving, of really feeling alive, he is equally incapable of understanding why. Everything earlier than a moment in the family potting shed when he was 14 is blotted out of his mind, has been carefully blacked out of his family's, and offers not a chink of light to his psychoanalyst. The journey back--Greene ingeniously uses a cocky teen-ager to get him round a few tough corners--has too much of the real pull of a good detective story to be decently disclosed. On the other hand, the disclosures themselves--involving not just a miracle but a miracle born of a vow--constitute the very heart and soul of the play. In journeying from effect to cause, Greene has also, in his own way, moved from a character's question to a playwright's answer.

Greene's own way is always along a rocky, twisting, darkly landscaped road; it is no spiritual Easiest Way. If Greene, in treating the Callifer family, sharply satirizes the bigotry of disbelief, he never --however insistent his personal answer--brings bigotry to faith. The play's emotional power derives from its harassed outcries and silences, from very human bafflements and needs, from a truly serious man's intensities and jocosities alike.

The Potting Shed is much less dour than The Living Room, not only because at the end James Callifer has found a measure of faith, but because the whole play is concerned with faith and not with sin, and because it pivots on a priestly uncle who fortifies rather than fails the protagonist. And though neither play fully sustains itself, the last-act letdown of The Potting Shed is more like that in The Cocktail Party. Here, Greene the playwright takes a whole act for what the novelist could wind up in a chapter.

But for two acts, culminating in a superbly dramatic revelation scene, The Potting Shed, by its writing and storytelling alike, more and more grips and stirs its audience. And thanks to a generally fine production, the last act is partly salvaged. As James Callifer's mother, Dame Sybil Thorndike displays an almost vanished grand manner. As James's exwife, Leueen MacGrath has quiet poise. As James, Robert Flemyng manages to make flatness sharp and inner deadness alive, while Frank Conroy, as the uncle, is merely perfect.

Eugenia began life, under its maiden name of The Europeans, as a Henry James novel. After 78 years it has emerged--in Randolph Carter's adaptation--as a vehicle for Tallulah Bankhead. Thereby, dead and dangling from its gibbet, hangs a tale.

In The Europeans James told of two elegantly hard-up Continental worldlings--a baroness and her brother--who descend in a fortune-seeking mood on their rich, staid, starched Boston kinfolk. Light, bright, "easy" James, the book is less a comedy of intrigue than of attitudes, of dull innocents shocked by Europe and gay intriguers stupefied by Boston.

Eugenia is a curious production scarcely in keeping with James. It has been staged as though Tallulah were in the presence of nothing but waxworks, while she herself performs as if completely surrounded by leopards. Turning a pastel into a circus poster, Tallulah, her personality crackling like a whip, her voice sounding like a bull fiddle, gurgles and snorts and snarls. It is all on occasion forceful, but in general it may well set a record for incongruity that only something like Mae West as Snow White can top.

Yet Tallulah, often enough, turns out to be amusingly misguided, where everything else in the production is hopelessly misbegotten.

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