Old Plays in Manhattan

As You Like It (by William Shakespeare; produced by the Theatre Guild) poses the same problem as country life for city folks: how to get the charm without the boredom. A host of modern inventions have helped turn the trick with rural life, but few productions have found the answer for As You Like It. It remains stubbornly bucolic, discursive and dawdling, with the poetry no real match for the plot.

With Katharine Hepburn as Rosalind, As You Like It is now tried again, and for a while does nicely. Its gaily dressed figures, prettily painted landscapes and well-sung songs give it rather the graceful air of a masque. The quickly shifting scenes at the start give it movement. But once it enters the Forest of Arden, where the scenery stays put and the story refuses to, the charm wears ever more thin. All the world loves a lover, but not everybody loves eight in one play--particularly when they include Audrey and Touchstone and Phebe and Silvius with their prattle, their puns and their depressing high spirits.

A beguiling Rosalind can do much to offset, if never quite obliterate, all this. Actress Hepburn's Rosalind reflects too much the player and too little the part. She seems the very best sort of performer --talented, cultured and good-looking--in college dramatics; she plays the whole thing more as a romp than a love story, and does beautifully by the blank verse while skating right over the poetry. William Prince makes a pleasantly lovesick Orlando, Ernest Thesiger a relentlessly melancholy Jaques.

The Devil's Disciple (by George Bernard Shaw; produced by the New York City Theatre Company) did something rare for City Center's dramatic productions : it left the critics cheering. This was a real victory for the Center's new regime under Maurice Evans; it raised fresh hopes for large-scale repertory. And inside 24 hours the production itself was scooped up and scheduled for Broadway.

But the victory was most of all Shaw's. Margaret Webster's production, with Evans in the title role, is properly lively, but more lively than skillful; and at the cavernous City Center, where audibility must come before art, it is not so much spoken as shouted. The play's the thing--at any rate the second half of it. At the start of this comedy of the American

Revolution, Shaw takes pretty heavy potshots at Puritanism and family affections, and the devil's own time to get going. But long before the end he is showering the audience with largess.

In the play the British, having captured a New Hampshire town, decide to hang a prominent rebel as an example to the townspeople. But for the parson they are seeking (Victor Jory) they mistake a godless scamp (Evans) who is drinking tea with the parson's wife (Marsha Hunt). The scamp, however, insists on carrying out the imposture, and in the gaudiest traditions of melodrama has his neck in the noose when deliverance comes.

While the story is moving in one direction, Shaw is of course moving in another, and the heroics are being made into hash.

In his scamp's behavior, Shaw offers a kind of motiveless heroism much like Andre Gide's famous motiveless crime. For the scamp is not in love with the parson's wife, does not think the parson more worth saving than himself, is not a suddenly remorseful sinner or wildly exalted patriot. He is chiefly a mouthpiece for a writer who is himself full of the Old Nick.

That writer, who in Saint Joan wrote the greatest trial scene in modern drama, in The Devil's Disciple wrote the gayest. Comedy foams over into sheer fun, and in the character of General Burgoyne (Dennis King), into sheer wit. Some of Burgoyne's rejoinders have become classics. When the scamp, sentenced to be hanged, begs for a soldier's death before a firing squad, the general stares. "Have you any idea," he drawls, "of the average marksmanship of the army of His Majesty King George the Third?"

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