This Was a Man. Precocious Noel Coward, incessant tosser-off of suavely sexual plays, tossed this one off a bit too carelessly. Though the Lord Chamberlain suppressed the piece in London, Broadway showed signs last week of yawning at one more husband world-wearily indifferent to his cuckoldom.
The wife (Francine Larrimore) is given ample scope for gliding sinuously from chair to chair and finally into the bed of her husband's friend, Major Bathurst (Nigel Bruce), just prior to the second act curtain. When the Major, personifying the stalwart virtues of the British Army, turns upon Miss Larrimore with a tongue-lashing for her immorality, the audience can almost imagine itself listening to the scene in Playwright Coward's Vortex wherein the son flayed his mother for her debauchery. Next year young Mr. Coward
will doubtless write this scene into another play with an even more successful stench. Last week his "new twist" was to let the Major succumb to the wife after tongue-lashing her, and then to bring the husband wistfully on the scene.
The Witch. If her lines or "business" contain any dramatic quality at all, Alice Brady conveys it surely and deftly over the footlights. Her work in The Witch is one of the season's brilliant feats.
The play, translated by John Masefield from the Norwegian of Wiers-Jenssen, is not so happily inspired. It seems amorphous in character. Starting with the revelation that witchcraft was a medie val actuality, it proceeds to trace the growth of witch-power in young Anne Pedersdotter, second wife of the old village pastor, guilty sweet heart of his son. To satisfy her love, she casts the spell of death upon her old husband. Accused by her mother-in-law, she shrinks from the trial by touch and oath, confesses with a wail of misery and despair her witchcraft, goes to feed another Lutheran bonfire.
Act I discloses the populace in pursuit of a witch, made fearsomely real by Mme. Ouspenskaya; Act II: Anne's growing consciousness that she too is of the devil's tribe. Just as the crisis begins to crys tallize, the medieval conception of passion as the spirit of Lucifer takes hold. Immediately, the audience is persuaded to see Anne not as a witch but as a woman of more than ordinary emotional capacity. Even the murder of her husband is extenuated by a plausible explanation of heart failure. Hence, confusion. There is a catastrophe, but it is not so much inevitable as erroneous. About to be burned, Miss Brady gave vent to her favorite repertoire of ear splitting, nerve-searing shrieks, seemed on the verge of rabies.