New Plays in Manhattan

The Chalk Garden (by Enid Bagnold) is one of those rare plays that are genuinely and fascinatingly individual. When the curtain rises on a Cecil Beaton drawing room in Sussex, nothing could look more conventional. Even when the characters seem less in a comedy of manners than a comedy of mannerisms, Playwright Bagnold could still be having fairly usual fun with her eccentrics. But soon enough there is evidence of a special mind and temperament at work, of a kind of grande-dame method of playwriting, wayward and unconciliatory, but with a wit that delights and an authority that mesmerizes.

Inhabiting Playwright Bagnold's Sussex manor house are a self-indulgent, irresponsible dowager who exerts a Lady Macbeth manner on trifles, her adolescent granddaughter who indulges in mischief and fabricates melodrama, a rather Shavian manservant who cannot bear being criticized, and upstairs, dying, a butler who for 40 years has ruled the household. Into it, as a companion for the granddaughter, comes a primly dressed woman with a superb and transforming knowledge of gardens, a gift for ingratiating herself with people, and an obviously beclouded past. How beclouded is made clear when a judge (Percy Waram), who is a friend of the family, comes to lunch.

Thereafter, all the decorative oddities, all the artificial-comedy attitudes of The Chalk Garden prove a legitimate contrast and offset to a certain muted reality. Not without cost has the companion achieved a green thumb for people as well as plants, where the other characters all show gloved or clammy hands; not without reason has she been able to make things grow in a garden built on chalk.

Despite all the chalk, there is no lecture at the blackboard. There are a few too many whiffs of symbolism, but Playwright Bagnold is neither mystical nor didactic. Instead, after the fashion of all true high-comedy writing, something simply becomes the more touching for having seemed brittle, the more penetrating for having seemed fagade-like. The paper chase of upper-class antics and insolences does lead to the human heart; among so many blank-cartridged witticisms there are one or two real bullets.

Playwright Bagnold's sidelong, elegantly savage play fortunately gets the production it altogether requires. Gladys Cooper as the booming, inwardly empty dowager and Siobhan McKenna as the quiet, inwardly burning companion create a brilliant contrast and head a talented cast. Though doing justice to the play's darker moments, the cast keeps it throughout an engrossing entertainment.

The Desk Set (by William Marchant) is institutional comedy, dealing with a TV network's research department. The four women in the department--the top one being Shirley Booth--are walking information centers and phone-answering encyclopedias. But elsewhere in the organization, the human brain has been successfully replaced by electronic ones, and soon, menacing the four women's livelihood, a huge mechanical dragon appears in Research too.

The Desk Set pits watts against brain cells purely for the gags and gadgets involved. It makes no cultural comments.

It is concerned with a situation and can scarcely be bothered with satire; at the final curtain there is not only job security for all, but a high-placed husband (Frank Milan) for Actress Booth.

As a play, The Desk Set, after a reasonably bright start, goes steadily downhill by really going nowhere at all. As a feed-box for Shirley Booth, there is more to be said for it. She has seldom been better at the rueful smile or the sugar-coated sting. It would be inaccurate to say that in The Desk Set she does everything but recite Hiawatha, because she does recite Hiawatha. She also recites, in jive rhythm, Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight. She floors an efficiency expert with her knowledge, she has a laughing fit, she has a drinking scene. Again and again she says practically nothing and makes it seem funny. She almost, but not quite, renders the playwright's job superfluous.

Deadfall (by Leonard Lee) is a murder yarn in which what is really murdered is a bright idea. A woman's husband is killed; when the man tried for the crime is acquitted, the woman--certain that he is guilty--vows vengeance. She assumes a new name and an on-the-town personality, gets to know the acquitted man, frames him for the "murder" of her fictitious self.

Deadfall's first blunder is to show all this at the outset, so that the second, or courtroom, half of the evening merely drives in the coffin nails. There is no suspense and--a second serious error--no final twist that might help save the day. Among other blunders, the writing is studiously mediocre.

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