New Play On Tour

Without Love (by Philip Barry; produced by The Theatre Guild) offers the public its latest chance to see Katharine Hepburn defrosted. This time she is a prominent young Washington widow whose memories are too sweet for her ever to want love again. She meets a jilted young economist (well played by Elliott Nugent) whose memories are too bitter for him ever to want love again. So, at the end of Act I, they coldly set forth on a marriage of companionship; by the end of Act II they coyly lift the embargo on sex; but it is not till the end of Act III that Playwright Barry lets them avow their blatantly self-evident love for each other.

This convenient plot serves as an excuse for the familiar Barry froth and the familiar Barry philosophizing. Against a background of official Washington, Barry shows his economist trying to straighten out Anglo-Irish relations. "The trouble between England and Ireland," one character says with an airy contempt for history, "is not political or economic, but human"; and there are indications that the triumphant trial marriage is meant to point a moral for Eire and Britain.

Otherwise, Without Love is social comedy -- volleys of wisecracks, whiskey-&-sodas-, catty women, a dashing Frenchman with a sinvitation for every pretty woman. At times it is gay and amusing. It may be more so by the time it has finished a tryout tour of three months and is ready for Broadway.

Actress Hepburn, with her glacial purr, her arctic charm, her sudden dazzling flashes of girlishness, her usual knock-out white evening dress, is its present best attraction.

New Play in Manhattan

Yesterday's Magic (by Emlyn Williams; produced by The Theatre Guild). Had Playwright Williams said "Stop me if you've heard this one," the entire first-night audience at Yesterday's Magic would have stopped him halfway through Act I. For, with the conscientious assistance of Actor Paul Muni, the talented author of Night Must Fall and The Corn Is Green has told one of the most hackneyed of all sentimental yarns, and told it hammily.

It's about the once famous actor who ruined his career through drink, and lives with his pretty, self-sacrificing daughter in a squalid London rooming house. Then opportunity knocks: the girl meets a nice young man, and the father gets the chance to make a comeback. But on opening night, the old boy falls off the wagon; the girl renounces love for duty; the father overhears her, and kills himself.

Playwright Williams has dressed this stage property up in its shabbiest and gaudiest clothes: references to the great days of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, gobs of rooming-house atmosphere, the comic landlady, the warm-hearted slut. Actor Muni has the good sense not to overact in a part he lacked the good sense to turn down.

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