THEATRE
DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS. By Eugene O'Neill. (Embassy.) DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS. By Eugene O'Neill. (Embassy.) IF Desire Under the Elms still succeeds in
imposing itself upon it is less because Eugene O'Neill had something worth saying than because he tried hard to say something. Tried too hard, in fact : groping around for, America's grass roots, and rediscovering life in a New England farmhouse a century ago, he took it all far too seriously. Primitives are funny—in the sense that O'Casey's Dubliners are funny. They are 'naturals': they have to have it in them to make us laugh if they are to make us weep. Treat them dramatically and they become turgid; treat them merely as quaint and the heart goes out of them; this production does both. But in any case, the play would need actors big enough to thump audiences into submission : and the British actor has not got it in him. He can no more play Cabot than he can play Fluther or the Paycock; it is out of his range; he is too civil. Two of the Embassy cast come reasonably close to doing what is required of them. David Garth matches Ephraim Cabot's dignity, but misses his hardness. He does not look as if he could thrash Ills sons; he does not even look as if he would want to. He wins our sym- pathy much too soon; it is won even before the moment when he turns on his new wife, in their bedroom, and berates her for not listen- ing to his interminable harangue about the farm. His rebuke should snake out over a torpid audience like the lash of a whip; it is spoken here as if he were chiding an inattentive child. As his wife, Pat Sandys comes near to the fine frenzy she brought recently to The Crucible. That she does not quite recover it may be because this New England Abbie is not as demoniacally possessed as her Salem namesake; but also because she is uneasy at times, with O'Neill's dialogue and jargon. The production, all things considered, is effective. Some of its tricks—the dancers' tableau—mis- fire; but it is a considerable feat to have put across the play at all. Turgid it may be at times, but it is never tedious.
BRIAN INGLIS
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