New Play in Manhattan

The Dark Is Light Enough finds Christopher Fry occupied with the soberer side of life--or, at any rate, of language. Described as a "winter comedy" and set, during the 1848 Hungarian revolt, in an Austro-Hungarian country house, it uses the framework of costume drama to pursue philosophical truth. Fry's titled chatelaine is a sort of spiritual Lady Bountiful who hides in her house a scoundrelly deserter who was once her son-in-law. The situation, affecting a great many people, new-facets such old themes of romantic drama as love, compassion, loyalty.

The play is a kind of twilit allegory, a heroic drama that beats its swords into similes a work whose verbal abundance begets theatrical poverty. Brief scenes excepted, the play is most interesting where philosophically it is least so: in the first act where the situation is forged, where there is some of the clang of cloak-and-sword drama, where the words still fly upward. Thereafter, when they attempt to go inward, they suggest not a scalpel but an embroidery needle. Moreover, Fry is so unsimple with language that he can never really be complex about people. His deserter who sees himself "reduced to one dimension," has nowhere been raised to even two. Indeed, the cardboard flatness of Fry's scoundrel almost foredooms the play as drama. And Tyrone Power acts him with forthright but misguided vigor: what the part needs is sinuousness and style. For the serenities of the countess, Katharine Cornell's personal graciousness is more in accord.

The play has its merits--some whale-boned wit, metaphysical elegances, aphoristic insights. But Fry is more successful using life as a gymnasium than as a laboratory; theatrically, he is in less danger on a trapeze than on terra firma. He can make words perform all kinds of tricks, but not yet pulse with truth. Shaw, too, loved to send up rhetorical Roman candles. but Shaw's, unlike Fry's, sometimes came down hand grenades.

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