New & Old Plays in Manhattan

Ladies in Retirement (by Edward Percy & Reginald Denham; produced by Gilbert Miller) gave Broadway its first real shivers of the season. A good, broad-beamed, solid-walnut English melodrama, it mounts from scene to scene toward a fine, dimly lighted, clock-striking-midnight climax in Act III. Though not the most gory or grisly or ghostly of horror plays, it has what most of them lack: an excellent balance of atmosphere, characterization and plot.

The time is 1885, the scene a farmhouse in the English marshes where aging, rouged Miss Fiske (Isobel Elsom) is enjoying the fruits of hard work in the world's two oldest professions. Her dark, bonneted housekeeper (admirably played by Flora Robson) is saddled with two potty sisters, and tries to billet them on Miss Fiske. When the loonies strew her parlor with seaweed and dead birds, Miss Fiske bids them be off; but being penniless as well as potty, they have nowhere to be off to. In order to give the girls a home, the desperate housekeeper does her mistress in.

She does a neat job, but unfortunately her snooping, thieving nephew guesses what aunty has done and decides to blackmail her. The clash of wits and wills between the two keeps the play tense with excitement till near the end.

Ladies in Retirement is one of those hard-hitting, old-fashioned melodramas which somehow make the newfangled ones look sick. It is very English (even the daffy sisters remain outdoor girls to the last), but it makes a genteel Victorian parlor seem more sinister than any number of opium dens. And it has the solid English virtue of never sacrificing plausibility to excitement: every detail, is made clear, and every character is pretty much of a human being.

Making her Broadway debut in Ladies in Retirement, tall, strong-featured, 38-year-old Actress Robson is known in the U. S. via Hollywood (Wuthering Heights, We Are Not Alone), One of England's leading serious actresses, she has played older parts since youth, has probably depicted as many queens--Queen Elizabeth, Empress Elizabeth, Mary Tudor, Henry VIII's Katharine--as any other living actress. With Robert Donat, she worked hard in a little shoestring theatre at Cambridge; with Charles Laughton she played for a season at London's Old Vic. When Ladies in Retirement closes, she will probably go to Hollywood instead of back to England, because "I can't be funny, and there's little use doing a serious play in London while the war is on."

Liliom (by Ferenc Molnar; produced by Vinton Freedley) is still a charming play. Time has done very little to harm it--far less, certainly, than Producer Freedley.

Fragile enough is Molnar's fantasy of a swaggering, restless, ill-tempered barker (Burgess Meredith) who loves an inarticulate servant girl (Ingrid Bergman), marries her, beats her, commits a crime for the sake of the child she is bearing him, dies, is tried in Heaven, sent to Hell for 16 years, then allowed to return to Earth for a day to try to commit a good deed. The play's appeal lies partly in its letting the audience understand perfectly someone who never understands himself at all --who is bad because he is afraid to be good, who beats his wife because he is ashamed of loving her.

But the play's appeal lies also in the lightness and grace with which Molnar tells it. He is able to infuse a whimsical humor into his story of a rogue who struts before the bar of Heaven and cannot learn humility even in Hell.

When the Theatre Guild produced Liliom (with Joseph Schildkraut and Eva Le Gallienne) 19 years ago, it found the right tone and tempo. Last week's production does not. Not only does Actor Meredith fail to catch Schildkraut's swagger, and the sets fail to measure up to Lee Simonson's stunning original ones, but the play moves slowly, puffingly, from scene to scene--as though Liliom took his round trip to Hell and back on a milk train.

Lady in Waiting (by Margery Sharp; produced by Brock Pemberton) took Comedienne Gladys George back to Broadway after a longish spell in Hollywood. She found a perfect part for herself, but unfortunately not much of a play. Dramatized by Margery Sharp from her own novel, The Nutmeg Tree, Lady in Waiting is like a party that starts off gaily, then turns into something where the cocktails weren't mixed right and the guests won't mix at all--leaving nothing but the charm and high spirits of the hostess to save the day.

Miss George is that hostess and she has plenty of high spirits, but the party is pretty much of a flop. Miss George plays a let-her-rip U. S. showgirl who had been an English officer's war bride. Invited for a visit by her grown daughter (whom she hasn't seen since infancy and who has been brought up a lady), she goes, intending to play the lady too. Daughter turns out to be a terrible prig, and since Mama can't even dress like a lady, let alone act like one, there's quite a todo.

The play being farce, Mama cuts capers instead of crying into her pillow, and the capers get more & more farcical as the situations get more & more forced. But the play doesn't end as a farce. It ends as a fairy tale--with Mama, for no possible reason, bagging a great English diplomat.

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