Film and Radio Guide (Oct 1945-Jun 1946)

FEBRUARY, 1946 FILM AND RADIO GUIDt 55 THE PLAY'S THE THING BY FLORA RHETA SCHREIBER The Winter’s Tale, seldom produced, seldom anybody’s favorite Shakespearean play, came to life recently with rare vividness in an illuminating, radiant, and bewitching production by The Theatre Guild. The direction was by Romney Brent, the actor, and B. Iden Payne, a director associated with the Shakespeare Memorial Theater, Stratfordon-Avon. The essential wonder of this limited-run production was that we, the audience, believed in it. It was a story having visible life, a fantasy moving before us, a dream through which we escaped all remembrance of the reality that surrounds our daily life. In this state of childlike credulity, of fervent faith in the proceedings before us, we watched Leontes, the spineless king, yield to an insane jealousy. We watched this unfounded jealousy wreck the lives of Hermione, the queen, of the young prince, of others in the court, of the king himself. When man makes his own evil with no end in view, with no motivation other than the passion of a moment, we look on human frailty at its most vulnerable and perhaps at its most vicious. Our own sense of guilt is evoked. And out of this sense comes our longing for vindication or at any rate our longing to make things as they were before that pitiless moment against which our present pain has been pitted. That is why the second half of the play, the half that takes place after a lapse of sixteen years. Flora Rheta Schreiber though often deprecated for its change of tone, is actually so satisfying. It seems to me — or at any rate in the recent production it seemed to me — that the change of tone is justified by the final, cumulative effect. The second half is the wish-fulfillment half, the half that distils beauty out of the horror of the first half, that makes it possible for us to wake up and go back into the world of sense. The famous scene of the second part in which the statue of the dead queen comes to life seems credible precisely because the wish aroused in us in the first half of the play is strong. As presented at the Cort Theatre this scene had meaning even for the most redoubtable Sancho Panza in the audience, who for once forgave fantasy and forgot to clamor for a nice naturalism. The feeling that everything is turning out for the best, that self-same feeling which is also at the root of the trashy happyending of popular vintage, here operates with a logic of its own, illuminating the scene and making it as right in the presentation as in the wishing. There was in this production a rare unity of conception and style. Stewart Chaney’s costumes were brightly beautiful; his conventionalized settings a nice frame for the action. The acting was now stately, now capering. Henry Daniell played the baffled and baffling king with unaffected eloquence. Jesse Royce Landis brought dignity and tragic intensity to the role of the ill-used queen. Florence Reed’s low, resonant, evocative voice was admirably suited to the fiery Paulina, the noblewoman who cleaves to the queen with fierce loyalty. Geraldine Stroock was a lithe and fetching Perdita, born in sorrow, and the cause of the final reunion and resurrection. The entire company played together in a fine orchestration of motifs. Looking on from some distant heaven, Shakespeare, I’m sure, was very grateful to Messrs. Payne and Brent for distilling beauty from his much-ignored play. And we tired New Yorkers were grateful for a good draught of poetry and fancy in this atomic age, whose wonder too often eludes us. ★ ★ ★ Newest war play to descend on Broadway is Home of the Brave by Arthur Laurents, produced by Lee Sabinson in association with William R. Katzell. The play centers around a handful of GI’s who are assigned (Continued on Page 60)