New Plays in Manhattan

Too Late the Phalarope (adapted from Alan Paton's novel by Robert Yale Libott). It is too bad that so much of the serious writing for the theater should be mere rewriting--that playwrights should turn to novels for their plays, as though the best way to make a chair were to cut down a sofa. Alan Paton's dramatized African novel, like so many other adaptations, including Joyce Gary's dramatized African novel, Mister Johnson, loses the swell and amplitude of fiction without achieving the drive and intensity of drama. It is in some ways too obvious, in others too obscure; its scenes are chop-pily hitched on to one another like so many train coaches--and with the engine unfortunately at the wrong end.

This is the more costly in that Too Late the Phalarope has to fuse a variety of themes and a welter of relationships, while the story's very background is imperious. The play involves the division between the Afrikaners and the English as well as between whites and blacks. Its young policeman hero (Barry Sullivan) --who, by sinning with a native girl, tragically violates both the law and a relentless social code--stands in as fissuring a relationship to his bigoted Puritan father (Finlay Currie) as to his narrow, unresponsive wife. There are half a dozen sources of voltage and half a dozen reasons for crossed wires; and such a complex of race and religion, of family and sex, cannot be cut down without having something like the heart of it cut out. Adapter Libott has nowhere vulgarized the story, Director John Stix has nowhere sensationalized the storytelling, Scene Designer George Jenkins has almost everywhere intensified the atmosphere, but there is seldom any living sense of drama or deep-felt sense of tragedy.

Pieter Van Vlaanderen's relations with his father, his wife and the native girl, far from creating a tight, nooselike knot, never wholly intertwine. Considering the terrible known consequences of such an act, the affair with the girl lacks compulsion; and Pieter's relations with his wife, if clearly blueprinted, are stiltedly conveyed. When, at the end, the father harshly casts out his son and sternly seals up his house, the play comes suddenly to life, with a scene of vibrant theater. But it is still a standing broad jump of a scene, without the running start, the rising momentum of a whole play behind it.

The Reluctant Debutante (by William Douglas Home) is the latest smart trifle from London, where it has been a hit for over a year. In a succession of glossy costume changes, it tells of a determined society matron's efforts to find a gilt-edged husband for her uncooperative debutante daughter, while the girl herself falls in love with a cad. In one of those splendid reversals of the seeming truth, the shakoed young palace guardsman whom Mother favors proves morally unworthy of such exalted employment, while the handsome cad emerges not only a verray parfit gentil knight but, at the last moment, a duke as well.

Though Playwright Home is not above dishing up such a leftover of belowstairs fiction, he gives it all the frills of carriage-trade playwriting. If thickly interlined with snob appeal, it also has its fun with snobs. If all its people are frightfully well born, half of them seem ostentatiously ill bred. Hen-brained, hard-driving Mama, a kind of chic Jane Austen's Mrs. Bennet, is paired off against a sardonic but kindlier Mr. Bennet of a father. Mama and her friend Lady Crosswaithe, who also has a gel to marry off, coo at each other like doves while scratching like wildcats. So much of the dialogue is delivered into a telephone that the instrument is listed among the cast of characters. The author's chief problem is to make banality seem fresh, stupidity amusing, and vulgarity stylish.

But the more acute problem of a play like The Reluctant Debutante is to as semble one of those impeccable drawing-room comedy casts who, with the elevation of an eyebrow or the slumping of a shoulder, can enliven, disown, or if necessary obliterate the text. For, though sometimes pleasantly droll, Playwright Home is seldom witty, and even his small talk all too often goes from badinage to worsinage. Despite Cyril Ritchard's suave direction, the play lacks first-rate ensemble playing. As the father, Wilfred Hyde White--a master of dry, quiet, casual acting--is delightful; as the mother, Adrianne Allen is.amusingly brisk; and Anna Massey has a style of her own as the girl. But most of the supporting players lack finish, so that there is not quite enough spin to make up for a shortage of sparkle.

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