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"Let Right be done" is a tenet of the English courts. Off-Broadway's Roundabout Theater has done right by The Winslow Boy, which first appeared on Broadway in 1947. The "well-made play" was much in vogue at that time, and in the carpentry of artifice, Britain's Sir Terence Rattigan probably had no peer.
The story, drawn from a real event in pre-World War I Britain, involves Ronnie (David Haller), a naval cadet who has been expelled for supposedly stealing a five-shilling money order. Convinced that his son is innocent, Arthur Winslow (Ralph Clanton) launches a David-vs.-Goliath struggle against the powers that be. Thanks to a top barrister (Remak Ramsay) whose icy hauteur masks a passion for justice, the boy's name is cleared, but the economic and emotional costs are high, especially for Winslow's daughter Catherine, who loses her fiancé. The strikingly attractive Giulia Pagano makes her spunky, perceptive and vulnerable. She is an actress whom you watch from the beginning and are bewitched by at the end.
A LIFE by Hugh Leonard
Irish Playwright Hugh Leonard is a kind of family doctor among contemporary dramatists. He probes the aches and pain of a lifetime. Drumm (Roy Dotrice), the unheroic hero of A Life, whom we first met in Leonard's "Da, " is an aging civil servant with razor-blade lips and a cut tingly witty tongue. He is dying of cancer, and what he finds out in this play is that he has squandered his life by suppressing it.
From boyhood on, he made few friends because he was so aloof and acerbic. He lost the only woman he loved (Aideen O'Kelly) by making her feel like an intellectual donkey. He has squelched his wife (Helen Stenborg) and berated his truest friend (Pat Hingle) for being a boozy buffoon.
An unappealing fellow, one may grant; yet his tart tongue yields much of the evening's not inconsiderable humor, and he wins the audience's grudging affection and concern by having applied more cruelly exacting standards to himself than he has to those he has mocked. —By T.E.K