New Plays In Manhattan

Bathsheba (by Jacques Deval; produced by Maximilian Becker & Lee K. Holland in association with Sylvia Friedlander) is just an ancient vehicle used to get British Cinemactor James Mason onstage for his first appearance on Broadway. Mr. Mason's performance as King David is an agreeable one, but it far from compensates for Mr. Deval's play.

In retelling the famous Bible story of how David lusted after the beautiful Bathsheba (Pamela Kellino, Actor Mason's wife), seduced her, and then sent her husband Uriah to be killed in battle, Playwright Deval has altered the intense black-&-white of its morality to a sleek Gallic grey. His David is both an evildoer and a decent-minded worldling. Having wronged Uriah, he afterwards tries to set things as right as possible.

But Uriah is a disconcerting, fair-haired innocent--a rigidly idealistic young soldier who takes noble vows and blindly worships his king. David finally concludes that death for Uriah would be infinitely less tragic than disillusionment and marital dishonor.

Playwright Deval's not unprecedented suggestion that moral values need not be the same for saints & sinners might have helped his play if it weren't so generally past helping. It is partly a mess because it hasn't a shred of self-respect. It trifles shamelessly with its material, trying to be dramatic one moment and comic the next. Worse still, it purveys some of its sex for leers.

But it's mostly a mess because--for all its straining to turn the Bible into the Arabian Nights--it's mostly a bore.

The Whole World Over (adapted from the Russian of Konstantine Simonov by Thelma Schnee; produced by Walter Fried & Paul F. Moss) is a Soviet comedy without a teaspoonful of Soviet propaganda. Indeed, even in the way of plot it would be hard to find anything less revolutionary. Laid in Moscow, the play deals with housing shortages, postwar readjustments and, above all, love--as they exist the whole world over.

It is a friendly affair, that introduces likable people and captures a nice stage warmth; but it is also pretty thin and frail. Its conventionally retarded romance involves a professor's daughter (already engaged to a dull, career-minded architect) and a colonel who comes home from war to find the professor's family occupying his apartment. The amusingly meddlesome professor (played with gusto by Joseph Buloff) keeps the architect--whom he doesn't want for a son-in-law -- hopelessly buried in blueprints so that the colonel can have a clear field with the girl.

The plot is slight and suspenseless, and not steered with-much skill. It is the professor, with his crotchets, jokes and advice, that gives the play a fitful animation; and an assortment of minor characters, most of them fellow-warriors of the colonel, that give it color and geniality. They keep popping in & out, seldom doing anything more striking than singing songs, drinking toasts, dabbling in the past, dreaming toward the future. But they frequently do all these things in a gay and human fashion, and occasionally their war experiences give the characters an unexpected third dimension.

Unfortunately they also have their dull periods, and their quite repetitious ones. But perhaps the chief trouble with The Whole World Over is that what should be its side dishes turn out to be the main course.

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