Quick, Rex, the Kleenex

By T.E. Kalem

IN THE PRAISE OF LOVE by TERENCE RATTIGAN

This is a soap bubble of a play. It floats about weightlessly. Its translucent emptiness glints with rainbow colors consisting of quippy dialogue and glamorously exploitative star performances. Expiring at last it drops to earth in the form of a sentimental teary splat.

The heroine, Lydia Crutwell (Julie Harris), is dying of an incurable polysyllabic disease. She is keeping this secret from her husband Sebastian (Rex Harrison), since he is a pitiably self-absorbed book critic. She feels that he could not remotely cope with anything as real as life--or death. That is Act I.

In Act II, it turns out that Sebastian knows of his wife's terminal condition and believes he is keeping it a secret from her. He does this by being crotchety and cavalierly asking Lydia to fetch his drinks, his food, and anything else that can be hand-carried.

To get the couple's deadly secrets unveiled, Rattigan relies on a kind of question-and-answer man, a mutual American friend, Mark Walters (Martin Gabel), who has become rich writing sex novels, and who dotes on Lydia with unrequited love. Long noted for resonance of voice and clarity of diction, Gabel gets the messages across to the playgoers all right and he may qualify as the highest-paid facsimile of a Western Union boy in the history of the legitimate theater. To give Gabel's unclouded intelligence its due, the gravity of his mien is sometimes tinged with a wry hint of skepticism about the contents of the play.

No such doubts assail the two leads. Harrison is letter-perfect, which is not too surprising since Sebastian is simply Henry Higgins 18 years older. His nasal drawl, his lounge-lizard posture, his Swiss-clock comic timing are on superb display. Harris matches him. She seems to have discovered the secret that eluded Ponce de Leon. With each passingplay, she appears more youthful --her face lineless, her figure trim, her carriage gracefully girlish. In acting subservient to her husband while deftly stage-managing everything, she strongly recalls those '30s heroines of S.N. Behrman's comedies who used to be played by Ina Claire or Katharine Cornell. Harrison and Harris salvage Rattigan, who, though famed for his theatrical carpentry, has on this occasion whittled out a toothpick drama. T.E. Kalem

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