Old Play in Manhattan

Love for Love (by William Congreve; produced by the Theatre Guild & John C. Wilson in association with H. M. Tennent, Ltd.) makes up the second half of English Actor John Gielgud's "Season of comedy" on Broadway. It is not Gielgud's better half; but, after all, Gielgud's Importance of Being Earnest was far & away the most brilliant revival of the season. Earnest, moreover, is only 52 years old; Love for Love, 252. For its age, Love for Love gets around on a Broadway stage very nicely.

A much less airy and aristocratic comedy than Congreve's The Way of the World, Love for Love is for that very reason a livelier theater piece. Its farce is its fortune; just about the broadest stage business in the whole play--countrified Miss Prue being taught city ways of love --is just about the best thing it offers. Indeed, like almost all Restoration comedy, much of Love for Love runs, sometimes boringly, to bawdry.

Yet the play deals sufficiently with manners to prove Congreve the most polished of the Restoration dramatists. Like the rest of them, he had a poor opinion of the human race. Either self-indulgence or self-interest is always well downstage in Love for Love; there is no love for love's sake. But where most Restoration writers were gross, Congreve was graceful. His people air their low thoughts in high language; his scandalmongers are witty; his sluts have style.

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