New Plays in Manhattan

The Druid Circle (by John van Druten; produced by Alfred de Liagre Jr.) deals with life--or rather the awful lack of it--in a wormy provincial British university "near the borders of England and Wales." The leading spirits there are all husks and cinders, all genteel pedants dead from the neck down. Worst of all is 53-year-old Professor White (beautifully played by Leo G. Carroll), whose thin blood has turned to bile, and who hates youth pathologically, not just as something that has vanished, but as something that never came his way.

When Professor White suddenly lights on a student's deeply personal love letter, he uses it as a real instrument of torture on the boy who wrote it and the girl it was written to. He finally forces the boy to read it aloud in the girl's presence and his own. Filled with shame and guilt, the girl proceeds to run away from college; but tragedy is averted and even the professor winds up more human.

The Druid Circle is an understanding and very often interesting play, but not quite a success. It is too full of clashing moods and shifting pressures. Between the university and the professor is more difference than at first appears--all the difference between the stuff of satire and the stuff of drama. With fluttering spinsters and tea-table gossip constantly cutting in on the professor's story, The Druid Circle seems too intense at moments, yet not intense enough as a whole. Playwright van Druten, who as a young man taught for a time at the sort of college he portrays, has perhaps put his imagination in bondage to his memories.

John van Druten had his first stage success (Young Woodley, 1925) when he was 24. Since then, he has rarely been without a hit--if not in London, then in New York. His biggest: There's Always Juliet (1931), Old Acquaintance (1940), and The Voice of the Turtle (1943).

Such consistent success was earned by the diligent exercise of a slender but well-muscled comic talent--a gift, said one critic, for being "obviously obvious about the very obvious." His father, a Dutch banker in London, insisted that John read for the law before starting a writing career. John dutifully did, began writing Young Woodley while teaching English law and legal history at the University College of Wales in Aberystwyth.

Besides some 25 plays, he has written verse, some short stories, and three novels and a dozen scripts for Hollywood, though his experiences there have been "unhappy, all of them unhappy."

An Inspector Calls (by J. B. Priestley; produced by Courtney Burr & Lessor H. Grosberg) and, finding the smug, well-to-do Birling family all at home, accuses one startled member after another of being partly to blame for a young working girl's suicide. Mr. Birling had once sacked the girl from his factory. On another occasion, Mr. Birling's daughter got her dismissed from a shop. The daughter's fiance had had an affair with the girl; so had Mr. Birling's son, who got her with child; Mrs. Birling had refused her charitable aid.

Having, in his tractarian zeal for driving home the idea of human responsibility, made the Birlings look like a pack of Victorian villains, Playwright Priestley suddenly begins to backtrack. Perhaps, he suggests, the young girl--whom each Birling had known by a different name--was really a great many different girls. Or perhaps the Birlings' visitor (Thomas Mitchell), who certainly didn't act like a police inspector, wasn't one. Perhaps there had never even been a suicide. Perhaps. . . . In his last 20 minutes, Playwright Priestley has a high old time perhapsing. Unfortunately, he has been prosing for so long before that his last-minute fireworks cannot save the play as a whole from seeming tedious. They can only, in fact, rather double-damn it as trivial too.

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