The Theater: New Play in Manhattan, Oct. 29, 1951

A Sleep of Prisoners (by Christopher Fry; produced by Luther Greene) is staged in the U.S., as it was in England, in a church (TIME, May 28). The setting and the resonant acoustics of Manhattan's St. James' Church are well suited to Playwright Fry's religious allegory; the actors (three of them from the original British cast) have mastered that rare trick of speaking poetry as though they meant it. But the play itself is another of those allegorical wastelands and wildernesses that the life of the times has imposed upon its literature.

Fry's own symbol is a prison: his characters, actual prisoners...

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