New Plays in Manhattan

Nude With Violin (by Noel Coward) is, more accurately, Noel with one string to his bow. The play concerns a just-dead and extremely famous painter who, it turns out, had never painted a single one of his pictures. As the painter's cheeky, in-on-the-swindle valet. Coward buzzes about while the dead man's family try to hush things up and cope with the actual painter--and potential blackmailer. Then it turns out that there was also a second painter. And, for that matter, a third--and a fourth. Though Coward has carefully varied the age, sex, color and nationality of the four daubers, their appearances seem curiously alike.

Repeating over and over the same joke --it can hardly be termed satire--Nude With Violin can scarcely help growing wearisome. What is worse, the play is at no point notably gay. Actor Coward is by all odds Playwright Coward's greatest asset; and as a special gentleman's gentleman--or rascal's rascal--he is perfectly placed for the goofy badinage, studied insolences, posh billingsgate and pecks that leave tooth marks which are Coward's forte. And when, sporting a New Look, he is very suavely going through all the old motions, he--and the play--are at their best. When he gets down to words, matters are less exhilarating. Using foreign words --jabbering in French, German, Russian, Yiddish, gibberish--he is fun the first five or six times. But using English words--though there are happy Coward glints and phrasings and intonations--he seems to be neither the hilarious mot juste expert nor the acid-throwing enfant terrible. There are false-tooth marks at best, and not too many of those.

Time Remembered (translated from the French of Jean Anouilh by Patricia Moyes) is by no means Anouilh's only play with fairy-tale trimmings. But it is the first in which the bad fairy--far from cutting up or winning out--is not even allotted a role. Though the ironist in Anouilh may jab the romantic in places, the cynic nowhere throttles him. On the contrary, Anouilh piles gilt on the gingerbread, and gives Cinderella her Prince Charming without any rushing from ballrooms or bother of trying on shoes. Indeed, if there is anything of a crooked smile to Anouilh's pretty nothing, it is in his playing it so almost completely straight.

The story concerns a young prince, disconsolate over the death of a vivid, orchid-eating ballerina. He lives on a vast French estate that has reproduced the world of inns and nightclubs and ice-cream wagons that were part of his romance. Into this world the prince's wacky, loving duchess aunt brings a young milliner who greatly resembles the ballerina. The aunt hopes that her nephew will fall in love once more. At first he resents and snubs the girl, while she surmises that he has never really loved the dancer. But soon all goes spinningly.

Time Remembered is less moonlit than footlighted, and is most rewarding--in fact, is great fun--when it is a stylish theater piece, full of little acting doodads and knickknacks, of interpolated flourishes and roulades: a trio practicing orchid-eating, a wild snatch of Swan Lake, a bit of supper ritual, a quite mad hunting scene. As the flighty duchess, Helen Hayes --if not wholly French--is very often wholly delightful, alternating an actress' skill with a vaudevillian's liveliness. Richard Burton plays a prince who is more bored than bereaved with a fine sullen dash; and his verbal aria on how sad it is to be rich is far more piquant than anything of Saroyan's on how jolly it is to be poor. Susan Strasberg makes a very pretty but monotonous-voiced milliner, and Sig Arno a capital headwaiter.

As a sophisticated fairy tale, Time Remembered is sheer Molnar--and perhaps not quite sheer enough in itself. It has been attractively fairy-tailored: imaginative Oliver Smith sets, chic Miles White costumes, pretty Vernon Duke background music. And Anouilh has given it good writing enough, and elegant mannerism enough, of its own. But at times the play seems merely thin where it should be diaphanous, merely slight where it ought to be airy. Perhaps it needs a born pastry cook like Molnar, with his delicately browned, bite-sized ironies and his lightly philosophic macaroons. Perhaps it needs a more pervasive verve. Perhaps it only needs a wicked fairy, or a fuming stepsister, or a missing slipper. But for all its many graces, it is a touch unsatisfying.

"Opening in a new play is just like catnip to a kitten!" says Actress Helen Hayes, in her first week as the rollicking, white-haired, fuzzy-headed Duchess in Time Remembered. Shy, tiny (5 ft.) Actress Hayes, regarded by many as the First Lady of the American theater, is delighted to be back on Broadway in her first original role since Mrs. McThing in 1952,. "I couldn't bear to think of anyone else playing that delicious Duchess," she explains. "I guess I was just waiting for the right play to come along."

For a while it had seemed doubtful that the right play would ever come along again. In 1956, after her husband Playwright Charles MacArthur died (their daughter Mary died of polio in 1949), Helen told reporters that she was thinking of retiring. But after reading Time Remembered, she changed her mind. She threw herself into rehearsals with her old-time energy, got a special insight on how to play the Duchess while listening to a recital on a virginal (a 17th century harpsichord). "Suddenly it hit me," she says. "I'd been playing the old Duchess like pounding a bass drum. But she was like that music--dainty, airy, tinkling."

Buoyed by her current rave notices, she will not predict when she will retire, although she already has her final play picked out: Cockadoodle Daisy, written for her by husband Charlie, who drew on the life of Lady Elsie Mendl, the acrobatic nonagenarian decorator who wore her hair blue and regularly stood on her head. "But I'm not ready yet," says Actress Hayes. "After all, I'm only 57, and Lady Mendl lived to be over 90. I think I'll put it off for a while."

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