Newsclips of 1936

By T.E. Kalem

CROWN MATRIMONIAL

by ROYCE RYTON

In Crown Matrimonial, British Playwright Royce Ryton qualifies as one of the grounds keepers of history. He rakes up a pile of yellowed 1936 newspaper clippings to reassemble the tale of how Edward VIII abdicated his kingship in order to marry "the woman I love."

At this late date, the yielding up of an imperial crown for the hand of Wallis Warfield Simpson cannot remotely claim the urgency and import that H.L. Mencken once assigned to it when he called it "the greatest story since the Resurrection." Ryton is a slave to the egalitarian fallacy--namely, that under the trappings of royalty lie simple everyday souls who have their ups and downs just like thee and me.

The play offers no new insight and makes no clear point. It pushes nostalgia to the brink of extinction. Queen Mother Mary (Eileen Herlie) is a starchy matriarch with a cast-iron devotion to duty. Edward (George Grizzard) is a kind of superannuated adolescent with vague notions of modernizing monarchy. As for the Duke (Patrick Horgan) and Duchess (Ruth Hunt) of York, they caterwaul incessantly about not having had enough on-the-job training to assume the reigns of empire.

With a plot devoid of suspense, an air of regality is of the essence. Eileen Herlie strives for imperiousness and achieves glacial suburban pomposity. George Grizzard suggests a jaunty detached habit of command, but any show of passion is dissipated in petulance. All in all, one has the unsettling impression that a pickup cast of stewards and maids from the crew of the Queen Elizabeth II could have mimicked royalty more convincingly.

--T.E.Kalem

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