Love in a Tepid Climate

The Irregular Verb to Love, by Hugh and Margaret Williams, raises the curtain on a new Broadway season, but the play is haunted by the tired ghosts of seasons past. To Love is still another family comedy, the sempiternal soap opera of the theater. This time, the family is British, part tea cozy and part zany. Mama (Claudette Colbert), a one-woman S.P.C.A. who identifies with small fur-bearing animals, has just done an eight-month stretch in jail for blowing up two fur shops with homemade bombs. Daughter is going to have an illegitimate child by an accountant who apparently lacks the caution proper to his vocation. Son is a bearded off-beatnik novelist who has brought home to London a monolingual Greek gamine first encountered in a Sardinian hay stack. Like son, like father. During Mama's absence, Papa (Cyril Ritchard) has had his own affair with a divorcee. "The moment my back is turned," says Mama reproachfully. "Your back wasn't turned," says Papa with injured innocence. "It was taken away."

Unfortunately, the Williamses flourish the needle of humor without jabbing it into any rich vein of comedy. An artificial drawing-room comedy can nurture an earthy home truth. But To Love spouts more poppycock about the parent-child relationship and child rearing than has been heard since Bertrand Russell ran a school where boys and girls played together in the nude. Elegantly gowned by Parisian couturiers, Claudette Colbert, who seems to have a dimple in her voice, whips herself into an understandable motherly and wifely froth. As the son, Robert Drivas is a personable rebel. The evening belongs to Cyril Ritchard, who could get laughs by reading an income tax form. If To Love had his high style, it would be to the comedy-of-manners born.

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