Macadam and Eve." (Aldwych.)
Alms, (temporarily known as Macadam) revisits.a Scottish seaside town in pursuit of a young woman named Evelyn: she and her 1)k)-friend, a medical student, are staying at a boarding-house kept b. a Mrs. Adamson, with whom, thirty years earlier, Adam con- tracted a fleeting marriage. Is the girl to marry her man, or run Am'aY with Adam, who has by now reached approximately the maturity of Alastair Sim ? Mr. Roger MacDougall resolves the plot of his new play by marrying the girl and boy, and introducing, .1 minute froin the end, another young woman for Adam to grapple
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Macadam is a wild-eyed, ramshackle opportunist who, were he not dignified with the first name of all, would be no more than a talkative old lecher. This is a :An of ideas—of something like two ideas ; Adam argues, between bouts of agony at having to make love, century by century, to callow and undeserving young women, that faith is the proof of faith, and that wisdom is always deflected from its path by sensuality. He reveals at the end of the second act that, in the course of his very un-Christian reincarnations, he has been Shakespeare and the Wandering Jew, and that he has no navel. Whisked into the nineteen-fifties, he spends his time " chasing wee girls in their nighties " and crushing, without much difficulty, people who make uninformed gibes at religion and the marriage ceremony. Adam, in fact, is made to appear a disappoint- ingly unimaginative quack : one recalled that crisp and ironic play Mr. Bolfry, in which Bridie's austerely eloquent Satan turned up at a Scottish manse (rainswept like Mr. MacDougall's boarding- house) with immense comic and theatrical effect. Macadam and Eve has just as promising an idea ; but the man is dead who should have written it.
It provides, none the less, enormous scope for a splendidly relaxed young actor, Mr. John Gregson, who plays the, medical student, bewildered and enraged by his girl's vacillations. Mr. Gregson is now doing for the traditional English juvenile what Mr. James Stewart did for his American equivalent years ago—making him careless, sulky and surly without loss of sympathy. He plays with a determined, pouting slouch which, though deeply funny, covers great sensitivity ; and he succeeds in projecting the same kind of earthy, shrugging poetry which we discovered last year in Mr. Richard Burton. Not least of his virtues is his tactful refusal to over-stress ; a fault remarkable in the rest of the cast, which includes John Laurie (Macadam), Beatrice Varley (the landlady)
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