Lord Pengo, which S. N. Behrman has modeled on the late Lord Duveen. high-priced art purveyor to U.S. multimillionaires, is, dramatically speaking, a 2½-hour still life. The play has poise, grace, urbanity, but it lacks any inner dynamic of change, conflict or direction.
In the plush, colonnaded picture gallery, Lord Pengo (Charles Boyer) wheedles, cajoles, amuses, and stimulates a cultural lust for owning Giorgiones and Masaccios in the blank-walled minds of crotchety, sulky and pinchpenny plutocrats. But, as someone says, for him selling is "a kind of disembodied activity, like praying," and disembodiment is the felt mood of the evening. Behrman dutifully...
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