New Plays in Manhattan

Cue for Passion (by Elmer Rice) has not gone to Hamlet merely for its title; it has gone there, quite openly, for its basic characters and plot. Since many Hamlets of one kind or another preceded Shakespeare's, it is not out of line that others should follow it; after all, it is for being the most fascinating of English plays that Hamlet remains the most familiar.

With any such retelling comes the added fascination of comparison: it is like returning to a former home to see how someone else has furnished it. In Cue for Passion the furnishings are sparser and extremely modern, with a picture window to let in strong, clarifying, psychological light. Hamlet, called Tony Burgess, comes home--sulky, sneering, perverse--after two years in Asia, certain that his new stepfather was his mother's paramour, suspecting he is also his father's murderer. This is an Oedipus-uncomplex Hamlet, so drawn to his mother that he hated his father, so identified with the lover's role that to kill his stepfather would be to kill himself. Truth tumbles out in a climactic modern Closet Scene, but consequences take a therapeutic rather than tragic turn.

Cue for Passion is interesting enough in its way, which is too merely intelligent a way. For the play seems less limited for how much it leaves out of Shakespeare than for how much it puts in of Freud. Plainly, Hamlet was made for Freud, but popular Freudianism much less so for Hamlet. To put all its neuroses in one bedstead is to rob a character of his tangled richness, a story of its resonant depths, and to turn what T.S. Eliot called "the Mona Lisa of literature" into a simple blueprint. And by adhering to such things as soliloquies and ghosts, Cue for Passion never quite goes its own way either. It ingeniously makes drunkenness an excuse for soliloquizing and a basis for seeing ghosts; but where Shakespeare uses both very early and formatively, Rice brings in both very late, making them misshape rather than mold John Kerr's nicely played but small-scale snarling boy. The play is most striking where, toward the end, it shifts the moral limelight from son to mother; and Diana Wynyard plays these later scenes brilliantly.

As a theater piece, Cue for Passion holds attention and, with no greater indebtedness than many Broadway rewrites, uses a far happier model. But as creative drama it is too explicit, too unlarge, in its writing too literary--often seeming, not like prose as compared to Shakespeare's poetry, but like prose as distinct from talk.

Edwin Booth (by Milton Geiger) is Jose Ferrer, and never the twain connect. This farrago of many scenes is nothing resembling a play; this thespian in many costumes evokes no once-great actor. Something has been borrowed from the legend of the Mad Booths, and something from the lives, to which have been added puns, pomposities, and speeches from Shakespeare's plays. In an atmosphere of swig-and-spout, Old Junius and Young Ned part company in California; Ned, amid rehearsals, finds romance with Mary Devlin; John Wilkes Booth shouts his Latin and is the assassin of a President; at the Players Club he founded, Edwin dies while thunder rolls.

That Edwin Booth is never for a moment valid stage biography is much more easily excused than that it is almost everywhere so resolute a bore. Whether or not theater folk are to achieve reality, they should at least create effects. Had Edwin Booth, however foolish, recaptured something high-bustedly gaudy, had John Wilkes provoked hisses or Edwin aroused huzzahs, had Shakespeare been spoken or even ranted well, a bad play might have proved a pleasant romp. But despite the dress-up and the makeup, there is virtually no make-believe. On an all-purpose set where anything could happen, almost nothing does. Even Shakespeare comes to resemble a string of cliches; even the madness of the Booths is doused by the madness of the enterprise.

The Quare Fellow is Irish prison slang for a condemned man. Around the imminent hanging of such a man, who himself never appears on stage, Irish Playwright Brendan Behan, sometime I.R.A. man and jailbird (see SHOW BUSINESS), has set down a clearly on-the-spot account. As in that memoir of another Irish Prisoner-Playwright, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, The Quare Fellow records the atmosphere, the emotions, the tensions of convicts and gaolers as execution nears. But, in Behan's play, as atmospheric pressure mounts, the need for outlets intensifies. Voices are raised, and fists; a half-brutal, half-compulsive humor dominates; the hangman gets drunk; officials get edgy; one warder carries out his job, but in a cold sweat of horror and guilt.

With an expressive off-Broadway arena-staging by Jose Quintero, The Quare Fellow is sprawlingly uncertain in design and graphically unflinching in detail. As an in-the-dock record, with capital punishment on trial, it avoids being strident but is only fitfully trenchant. Where it comes off well is as a tragedy of manners--of convicts outraged that a condemned man has not saved his cigarette butts, betting their Sunday bacon on whether the quare fellow will hang, greedily rushing the guard carrying the quare fellow's last dinner, fighting in the quare fellow's grave over his salable last letters. As a large-scale muralist, Behan lacks concentration and power; as a thumbnail etcher, he is at his vividest first-rate.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.