The Devil's Advocate (adapted from Morris L. West's novel by Dore Schary) asks the largest questions raised on Broadway this season—the largest questions, whether of Catholic theology or of living in the world, that man can ask. The play begins with a dying man sent off to ask questions about a dead one: a cancer-ridden English monsignor at the Vatican journeys to a mountain town in Calabria to serve as devil's advocate in the matter of a possible canonization. He is to investigate—in terms of his role, as critically as possible—the qualifications for sainthood of "Giacomo Nerone,'' an English World War II deserter who, before being executed by the Communists, had performed many great services, and possibly miracles, for the townspeople.
A cold man who amid ecclesiastical tasks had felt little human emotion, the monsignor, turned detective about the dead, runs full tilt upon love and hate, good and evil, in the living. Encountered in his investigations are a humanely skeptical Jewish doctor, a peasant woman who was Nerone's adoring mistress, their illegitimate teen-aged son, and a nymphomaniac contessa who clashes with a bitter homosexual painter over the boy. Watching past and present collide, seeing martyrdom cheek by jowl with betrayal and murder with suicide, the monsignor—before his own death—becomes a more troubled man of God and aware shepherd of men, as absorbed in the plight of sinners as in the credentials of saints.
A good many of the play's individual scenes—some of them flashbacks that put Nerone on the stage—have dramatic color and impact; several performances—Sam Levene's as the doctor, Leo Genn's as the monsignor—are striking. But though its theological concerns often acquire theatrical force, The Devil's Advocate seems discrete and unfocused in the theater.
Once again a novel's scalpel (TIME, Oct. 12, 1959) has been dulled, a dramatization has too much settled for mere drama. It is not simply that ethics have been a bit smothered in theatrics — though the production seems often needlessly stagy; it is equally that the edges have half obscured the center. For the colorful secondary characters to keep their full size, the chief ones — the monsignor and Nerone — must dwindle; indeed the meant-to-be Christlike Nerone never really takes shape.
As a result the play contains all the requisite moral compass points but, in an artistic sense, no needle pointing north; provides a large and picturesque altarpiece but without a dominating central panel.
Doubtless to dramatize its large questions, the story needs its large cast; but on the stage, the more it does with the one the less it can do with the other. Yet to keep close to the center, to what the monsignor learned about Nerone and about himself, would mean being involved with mystical matters and inward ones, things hard for the stage to bring off. The play, as it stands, is high-purposed and rather high-pitched, is vivid and at the same time ill-harmonized.