Cavalcade of Kings

The Hollow Crown. Britain may not be able to budge General de Gaulle, but Britons are having no trouble bowling over Broadway. In a distressingly dreary season, one of the few dramas of distinction is the British holdover A Man for All Seasons. Nothing on the boards is as stylish as The School for Scandal, or saucier than Beyond the Fringe and its off-Broadway sibling. The Establishment. Non-British plays like Tchin-Tchin and The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore are visibly sparked by the highvoltage acting of England's Margaret Leighton and Hermione Baddeley. Even cornball tastes are catered to satisfactorily in such limey-flavored musicals as Oliver! and Stop the World--I Want to Get Off. Now The Hollow Crown, more caviar than cornball, does not let the British side down. It is an expertly fashioned, gracefully rendered, persistently evocative evening of dramatic readings, chronicling a cavalcade of English monarchs from King Arthur to Queen Victoria.

At stage left sit four actors (Max Adrian, John Barton, Paul Hardwick. Dorothy Tutin) in evening dress, their only props a coffee table with decanter and water glasses, large leather-covered books to scribble in with quill pens, and a portable lectern. At stage right stand a harpsichord, a piano, a trio of skillful balladeers and their accompanist, who provide a harmonic counterpoint of period music to the proceedings. The actors read letters, poems and memoirs by and about royalty, together with historical reminiscences and profiles sketched by hard-eyed courtiers and literary greats from Malory to Jane Austen.

The connective theme of the evening, more sensed than stated, is that divinity, mortality and personality all hedge a king.

The telescoping of history heightens its ironies. In a letter to Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII can scarcely contain his urge to make her the "only mistress" of his life: "Whose pretty duckys I trust shortly to kiss." The very next reading is a letter Anne Boleyn sent from the Tower to plead for her life. Then comes a king who does not plead. Peremptorily charged with treason, Charles I stands on his divine rights: "I do not know how a king can be a delinquent." He rebukes his judges with a concept that is still sound after four centuries: "If power without law can make laws, I do not know what subject he is in England that can be sure of his life or anything he calls his own." No king is a hero to his courtiers, not for lack of kingly heroism but because courtiers are courtiers. The Hollow Crown is deliciously spiced with the barbed candor of underlings: "King George IV had not been dead three days before everybody discovered that he was no great loss."

Having toured Britain and the Continent intermittently for nearly two years, the Crown troupe is assured, but a trifle too slickly studied. It is slightly too intent on landing theatrical haymakers, so that some lines are hurried and punched at a playgoer's head that ought rather to insinuate themselves into his mind. The solidest stage presence is that of Max Adrian, who in the person of Horace Walpole mimes a cattily foppish account of the burial of George II in Westminster Abbey, including a depiction of one hypochondriac lord who stood on another's train "to avoid the chill of the cold mar ble.'' Adrian is equally deft in delivering James I's diatribe on the evils of tobacco with splenetically amusing Scots ire. Lovely Dorothy Tutin glows with ardor, though her delivery has a faintly distracting trace of inflected impurity; she is touchingly good as the headstrong but dutiful 18-year-old Girl-Queen Victoria telling her diary the events of coronation day.

To the democratic land of king-sized every things. The Hollow Crown players bring a rare and resplendent novelty, king-sized kings.

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