Lear in London

When London blacked out last September, the theatre blacked out with it. But not for long: the Government realized that a show is as much of a wartime bracer as a whiskey-&-soda, soon permitted every theatre in London to stay open till 10:45 or 11 p.m. For months, with the war so quiet that--as a wag put it--you could hear a Ribbentrop, London's theatre functioned virtually as in peacetime, except for a boom in musical shows and a drop in prices.

The fighting in Norway has caused no added censorship or new blackout restrictions, though it brought about a sharp 40% drop in box office. Even so, last week London had 43 shows to Manhattan's 24.

Reigning London playwright, who has put even Noel Coward's eye out, is 34-year-old Welshman Emlyn Williams, known in the U. S. chiefly for his murder play, Night Must Fall. Son of a Welsh miner, Williams did not speak English till he was eight, did not see a professional show till he was 19. Playing in London are his autobiographical The Corn Is Green, packing them in after 600 performances, and The Light of Heart, story of a drunken, down-at-heel actor who gets his last chance to stage a comeback in a myth ical Charles B. Cochran production of King Lear.

Williams' mythical Lear came just in time to steam London up for a real Lear. Fortnight ago John Gielgud--who played Hamlet on Broadway in 1936--opened in Lear at London's historic, wrong-side-of-the-Thames Old Vic. The stanch Old Vicars--highbrows, artists, workingmen, eccentrics--in tweeds and business suits, did not make for a glittering first night. But because Gielgud was fighting for art in wartime, and because he played the mad, storm-swept, kingly old man with understanding, London's critics voted Lear the most important theatrical event since the war began.

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