Muse at the Box Office

London still waited eagerly for T.S. Eliot's verse play, The Cocktail Party, now in its tenth sold-out week on Broadway. Meanwhile, it was busy doing homage to a meteoric new playwright, who, like Eliot, had turned the trick of making poetic drama a sizzling box-office hit. A year ago, few even in London literary circles had heard of Christopher Fry. Last week the name was marquee magic that packed two theaters with customers of all brow heights. The plays: Fry's Venus Observed, produced, directed and acted by Sir Laurence Olivier, and his

Ring Around the Moon, which Fry adapted from the French of Jean Anouilh.

Fry's work, which earlier this year kept four London theaters busy at once, had driven critics close to poetry themselves to do him credit. After seeing The Lady's Not For Burning, with which Actor-Manager John Gielgud introduced Fry to the public last spring, the Sunday Times's Harold Hobson wrote: "[It seemed] that the aurora borealis had turned humorist. Mr. Fry jests with Stardust, and is witty in iambics . . . He is a master jeweler."

All of Fry's plays are witty and rich in imagery, scant of plot, roundly romantic in temperament; some are medieval in setting and steeped in the religious quality of his Quaker's faith.

The Lady's Not For Burning will be brought to Broadway next fall by the Theatre Guild. A Phoenix Too Frequent, a one-acter, now rehearsing in New York for a late April opening, will be his first to reach the U.S.

London intellectuals are carrying on a running debate as to whether they have a new Shakespeare in their midst or just a particularly brilliant writer to be rated somewhere between Noel Coward and T.S. Eliot. For his part, 42-year-old Fry is taking his success with the same equanimity he has shown through slim years as an actor and schoolteacher. With his wife and twelve-year-old son, he still lives in a 6s.-a-week cottage in a Cotswold village, 28 miles from Shakespeare's birthplace, without telephone, electricity or gas. He works through the night by kerosene lamp, drives to London, only when he has to, in a small, secondhand car.

Like Eliot, to whom he acknowledges a great debt, Fry believes that verse in the theater should sound like colloquial conversation and "still rise to the dramatic occasion when you need it." In discussing poetry in a recent broadcast, he also displayed some off his gift for it: "Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement. It is the language in which he says heaven and earth in one word. It is the language in which he speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time. It has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not . . . give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time."

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