New Play in Manhattan

The Lady's Not for Burning (by Christopher Fry; produced by Atlantis Productions) is laid in the Middle Ages, written in verse, and rife with imagery. It sounds like dust and cobwebs; what it turns out to be is a broom. With great impish strokes and elaborate flourishes--and winking and singing as he works--Christopher Fry (see below) sweeps the prosy and the plausible off the boards for an hour. It is the performance of a fellow who not only knows how to handle a broom, but at intervals can ride off on the broomstick.

The Lady's Not for Burning is the child of poetry and prankishness--both parents springing from ancient British stock. It recaptures something of what Aldous Huxley said Elizabethan poetry had and later poetry lost: an ability to fuse comedy with lyricism.

The not-too-momentous story tells of a discharged soldier, half swashbuckler and half misanthrope, who wanders upon a market town to find it conducting a witch hunt. In an effort, both altruistic and egoistic, to divert attention from the unknown "witch" to himself, he bellows to anybody who will listen that he has committed murder and insists on being hanged. But once he sees the young and beguiling witch, he is willing to be cleared of murder and in a fair way to be cured of misanthropy.

The play is lightly splashed with irony and symbolism; beyond his other functions, the soldier, with his yowling for the noose, exemplifies a certain dogged modern-day pessimism. But the play is not to be dredged for large meanings. It says, if it says anything, that life itself is a tidal wave that overflows all philosophic sea walls.

Its forte is fireworks, not illumination. The keynote is sounded in the first five minutes, when the soldier exclaims: "What a wonderful thing is metaphor." Fry, in the last analysis, pins his real faith on words--by no means a bad thing for a writer to pin it on. He sometimes loves words too well: The Lady shows a streak of the clever undergraduate, the babbling drunk; it plays practical jokes on the slopes of Parnassus. Like much poetry today, it turns abruptly colloquial, with calculated bathos; at other times it bellies out with defiant bombast.

But though such impudence may now & again smack of exhibitionism, it actually bespeaks a kind of humility: Fry wears his singing robes as casually over his street clothes as a judge does his bench gown. There is a saving exuberance and sense of fun about the worst of The Lady, as there is a soaring ease about the best of it. After the naturalistic theater's monotonous verbal drip-drip into a bucket, The Lady's Not for Burning makes a fine bright careless splash.

The danger for a play like this in the theater is that it will be all wings and no feet. But John Gielgud's staging is as precise in detail as it is ebullient in effect; and a finely blended English cast knows how to rumble the lines or caw them, toss them to the roof or throw them away. As the soldier, Gielgud gives a dashing if slightly unmodulated performance. As the lady, Pamela Brown proves that Fry did not write the part for her in vain. No one has a more gloriously uppity charm; no voice can simultaneously so rasp and thrill; no one ever made standoffishness more come-hitherable.

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