Macbeth (produced by Maurice Evans in association with John Haggott) may at last pay its way on Broadway. Actors from E. H. Sothern and Robert B. Mantell to Lionel Barrymore and Philip Merivale have wrestled with its intractable horrors, have never made them popular. The blood-soaked tale of its towering, ambition-haunted criminals gets in places too much beyond human size to be fully communicable in the theater. The raging fevers of its hero's mind somehow strike cold upon the hearer's heart. But last week Actor Maurice Evans and Director Margaret Webster, who as a team have made nationwide box office of Richard II, Hamlet, Henry IV, Part I and Twelfth Night, offered a Macbeth which should succeed if any production can.
Though it lacks brilliance and intensity, the production has drive, clarity, continuity. Director Webster has made a play of it as well as a classic. Its smoky, night-lighted horrors are good theater, if nothing more. It even gets past such a technical bogey as the three witches by making them keep their distance.
Actor Evans always holds the stage; he does not always portray his part. His Macbeth at times has a tortured imagination and reckless cruelty, but never a great warrior's strength or a tragic hero's stature. Evans has the instinct of a reciter, a soloist, reaching out with vocal magnetism to the audience rather than working in with his fellow actors on the stage. He doesn't, for example, talk to the murderers of Banquo; the murderers simply seem to be there so that he can talk. He brings more to the play than to the character.
Far different, and on the whole far better, is the Lady Macbeth of Judith Anderson (Family Portrait, the Gielgud Hamlet). A characterization, not a recital, its power in the earlier scenes is flawed by overacting, but steadily improves, leaps the last and highest hurdle magnificently. In the sleepwalking scene, Actress Anderson, with her sick, half-strangled voice, her tottering, sleep-locked footsteps, above all in the terrifying movement of her "bloody" hands, really conveys the ruin of a once dauntless and unflinching nature.
Theatre (adapted from W. Somerset Maugham's novel by Guy Bolton & Mr. Maugham; produced by John Golden) is a half-brittle, half-gooey tale of a glittering English stage couple who seem to the public like Darby & Joan, behave in private more like Don Juan and Jezebel. The first half—in Maugham's typical drawing-room style—is a faintly nasty account of their infidelities, so carefully underlined that for a while it looks as if Theatre will be all smirk and no play. When the well of adultery runs dry, the authors rush with their buckets to the dripping fount of sentimental stage glamor: the star's dressing room on a great London first night, flowers, hubbub, reminiscing old doorman, tiff between actresses—and, in the midst of all this, the lover's dismissal and the husband's return.
A gal familiar to Broadway for a generation, with her hard little face and her soft, flabby hips. Theatre needs all the expert make-up and massage that Playwrights Bolton & Maugham know how to apply, all the stage presence and vivacity that Cornelia Otis Skinner brings to the role of the brummagem heroine. Even so, it's not very pleasant fun.