CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THE THEATRE
" The Male Animal." By James Thurber and Elliott Nugent. (New.) THE war between the sexes has been going on for some considerable time now, but it has attracted few war correspondents who ventured nearer to the front line than Mr. Thurber. It is perhaps his interest in what used to be called brute creation that lends to his despatches from the field their admirable objectivity ; the animal kingdom is never far from his mind, and it is against a background of its standards that he judges the frequently perplexing relations between men and women. The theme of this play might be described as combining the Eternal Triangle with the Recurrent Swastika. Set in a Middle-Western university in 1940, it examines the impact on Professor Thomas Turner's life of two things—a brash and bouncing football coach for whom his wife feels the reawakening of a girlhood passion, and an ideological witch-hunt which threatens the freedom of thought and teaching within the university.
Professor Turner is a somewhat mouse-like man, and it is really, I fear, the Demon Alcohol which nerves him to imitate the action of the tiger. It is not a very convincing imitation, for when he challenges the football coach to single combat he only succeeds in biting his opponent's thumb before being knocked senseless. In the ideological sphere his gangling posture of defiance is not perhaps in the romantic traditions of martyrdom ; but in the end a victory for the liberal decencies is won, and we go home with at least some reason to hops that academic life in America is capable of surviving the stresses of political hysteria to which it appears to be inter- mittently subject.
The acting at the New Theatre is sound without being distin- guished. Mr. Arthur Hill does well as the Professor, Miss Barbara Kelly brings a warm integrity to the not very easy part of his wife, and Mr. Hugh McDermott exhibits with gusto the terrifying shallow- ness of the football coach's mind. Mr. Jon Farrell represents the pig-eyed forces of reaction with marked ability, and Mr. Guy Kingsley Poynter is admirable as an undergraduate editor.
PETER FLEMING.
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