Old Plays in Manhattan

Fallen Angels (by Noel Coward) is 30 years old, and was far from robust when young. Fortunately, it has been given no orthodox revival: Noel Coward's limp play has been turned into Nancy Walker's gorgeous plaything. Actress Walker (On the Town, Phoenix '55) has become one of the theater's most wildly and continuously funny clowns, capable of rowdy hauteurs and of a stare that could blight fruit. To Coward's drawingroom yarn of two bored young wives who jointly, jealously, at length drunkenly await the arrival of a Frenchman they both sinned with years before, she brings nothing so conventional as a fresh approach, but rather a superbly irrelevant new dimension.

Early on. and while still sober, she can richly crunch even Coward's soggier lines, tangle with an all-too-cultured maid, or just move or stand still with feral ladylikeness. But not till a few corks have popped does she attain full stature. She is never so grand as when lurching, nor so gymnastic as when trapped in telephone cord. She employs her cigarette holder like a wind instrument, makes her gold scarf as vital to the production as several of the actors. She strikes attitudes so embattled that they seem to strike back, and she can dispose herself on a sofa to resemble the whole Laocoon group.

Along with feeding Actress Walker her lines, Margaret Phillips plays the other wife in the frillier style of high comedy. But Actress Walker contrives higher comedy: no mere grande dame, she is someone who could make a grande dame cower.

Tamburlaine the Great (by Christopher Marlowe*) reached Broadway 368 years after it was written. Really two plays without ever achieving the proper sense of a play at all, Tamburlaine has been understandably enough passed by. But, as dynamically staged by Tyrone Guthrie, it richly justifies a for-the-nonce revival. For if a failure, this vast creation of the 23-year-old Marlowe is yet a work of poetic genius; if undramatic, it can be stunningly theatrical; if monotonous, its monotony is a many-splendored thing. The "high, astounding terms" with which 14th century Tamburlaine assailed the world are equally those with which Marlowe assaulted the theater.

The saga of the Scythian shepherd who vaultingly subdued half of Asia and Africa is too brutally simple for true drama. With its host of bloody conquests and dearth of inner conflict, with its portrayal of one who toppled realms like tenpins, it scarcely provides even variations on a single theme. As Tamburlaine sweeps on, nothing interrupts his conquests and cruelties but his Marlovian sense of physical beauty and his feeling for Zenocrate, the captive princess whom he loved and lost:

Now walk the angels on the walls of heaven,

As sentinels to warn th' immortal souls

To entertain divine Zenocrate; Apollo, Cynthia, and the ceaseless lamps

That gently look'd upon this loathsome

earth, Shine downwards now no more, but

deck the heavens To entertain divine Zenocrate.

Nor does the play's second half bring any tragic reversal. Hubris, to the last, goes unpunished; only Death defeats the conqueror, and it by thrombosis, not spears or thunderbolts. Before that, the insatiable barbarian whose only principle is "the argument of arms" has created a pageant of carnage and torture. Caged royal captives bash out their brains; men hanged in chains are pierced by arrows: conquered kings must draw their conqueror's car:

Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia! What, can ye draw but twenty miles

a day, And have so proud a chariot at your

heels, And such a coachman as great Tamburlaine?

Tamburlaine stabs his own weakling son to death, burns the Koran to defy Mohammed, would pierce the very breast of God himself:

That, if I perish, heaven and earth may fade.

All this is not only of peculiar fascination to an age that has witnessed the revival of atrocity. Such conduct is what -- in the absence of Shakespearean remorse or classical retribution -- psychologically weights the play's later episodes. Tamburlaine is one who, having achieved enormous power, but must almost maniacally assert it: his is no self-preserving ruthlessness or vengeful rancor, but an ego-driven, gratuitous cruelty.

Creatively, Marlowe matches his hero's immoderacies ; he shows a like hunger and fever, a commensurate strut and rant. But, as mounted by Director Guthrie, the play has its genuine glories, with scene after scene resembling a kind of richly lighted Delacroix canvas. And, as played by Actor Anthony Quayle, Tamburlaine has his very real magnificences, with speech after speech boasting Marlowe's leap and resonance:

Nature, that framed us of four elements Warring within our breasts for regiment, Doth teach us all to have aspiring

minds :

Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend

The wondrous architecture of the world, And measure every wandering planet's course,

Still climbing after knowledge infinite, And always moving as the restless

spheres, Will us to wear ourselves and never rest, Until we reach the ripest fruit of all.

From passages like this it is not too far to the later magic of

Oh, thou art fairer than the evening

air Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.

* Born the same year as Shakespeare (1564), Marlowe managed, in a short life, to write some fine lyric poetry ("Come live with me and be my love"), a long narrative poem (Hero and Leander), and four superb poetic dramas: Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta and Edward II. A militant atheist, in flight from arrest, he was killed at 29 during a drunken brawl in a riverside tavern near London, probably a political victim of Queen Elizabeth's Secret Service.

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