4.9. Anatol
2
lu
box 9/4
HEMSTREET
96 WARREN STREET
NEW YORK CITY
Doun in Front
By Robert Littell¬
To the handful of recent plays on Broadway that
are worth seeing must certainly be added Schnitzlers
Anatol," as revived at the Lyceum Theater by Bela
Blau, And if one is to speak not only of the plays
themselves but of the way they are done, there are
two scenes in this new "Anatol" as beautifully set,
staged and acted as any scenes visible on the rest of
the theorical landscape namely, "Christmas Present
and "Farewell Supper."
These scenes are episodes in a play that achieves
unity, though it is built of fragments which, on the
surface, have little relation one with another. They
are pages from the album of love of a young man
whose whole life, so far as we can judge, is spent
adding chapters to that book, or rereading it. Each
one concerns a woman who with the fall of the
curtain disappears from us forever. She disappeare
from us, but for Anatol she is another jewel, rare
or semi-precious, in an unending necklace; another
memory, disturbing or carelessly tossed aside, to be
wrapped up with a crumbled flower, a packet of
letters, an identifying tog of verse.
They all are all so different, these women, that
the procession of them might go on forever, and
when they are brought to life as gracefully or freshly
as they are, in this instance by Patricia Collinge
and Miriam Hopins, one wishes that the procession
would never stop and that tomorrow one could see
Anatol and Max, in the persons of Joseph Schild¬
kraut and Walter Connolly, seated at another table,
waiting for yet another charmer, another scene in
which the mood, like life, never quite makes up its
mind whether to be lightly brooding or laughingly
tinged with sadness and regret.
Except in the scene before Anatole wedding, which
is almost pure farce, the threads of laughter and of
brooding are intertwined. The lines that smile have
a way of looking back into a past or forward into
a future that is not as smiling; words that are
melancholy are spoken so lightly, so fronically, that
they bring a smile. It is very hard, in the acting of
"Anatol," not to disentangle these two threads more
than they were meant to be, not to underline what
is funny and bear down upon or isolate what is not.
I suspect that in any playing of "Anatol it is the
more elusive and more serious side of it that will
suffer. Anything so sharply witty, so full of comi¬
surprises, will tempt the actors to play it for the
laugh. There is a tendency toward this in the
present production. Sometimes it goes even further
than a pardonable exaggeration.
In the character of Anatol there is now and then
a touch of the ridiculous which he himself acknow¬
edges. This "toy philosopher looks in the mirror
off and on and is amused, though what he sees there
is too personal for his amusement to be unalloyed.
Sometimes Mr. Schildkraut gets this admirably, as in
the scene called "Episode," where Anatol puts be¬
fore Max the collection of tiny parcels that are his
past. At other times, as in "Keepsakes," he seems
too much to be Mr. Schildkraut, the actor, making
fun, very obvious fun, of Anatol, the character
which, together with the way Miss Forrest insists on
crying, carries the scene away from Schnitzler to¬
ward the Hoboken manner of kidding revival.
2
lu
box 9/4
HEMSTREET
96 WARREN STREET
NEW YORK CITY
Doun in Front
By Robert Littell¬
To the handful of recent plays on Broadway that
are worth seeing must certainly be added Schnitzlers
Anatol," as revived at the Lyceum Theater by Bela
Blau, And if one is to speak not only of the plays
themselves but of the way they are done, there are
two scenes in this new "Anatol" as beautifully set,
staged and acted as any scenes visible on the rest of
the theorical landscape namely, "Christmas Present
and "Farewell Supper."
These scenes are episodes in a play that achieves
unity, though it is built of fragments which, on the
surface, have little relation one with another. They
are pages from the album of love of a young man
whose whole life, so far as we can judge, is spent
adding chapters to that book, or rereading it. Each
one concerns a woman who with the fall of the
curtain disappears from us forever. She disappeare
from us, but for Anatol she is another jewel, rare
or semi-precious, in an unending necklace; another
memory, disturbing or carelessly tossed aside, to be
wrapped up with a crumbled flower, a packet of
letters, an identifying tog of verse.
They all are all so different, these women, that
the procession of them might go on forever, and
when they are brought to life as gracefully or freshly
as they are, in this instance by Patricia Collinge
and Miriam Hopins, one wishes that the procession
would never stop and that tomorrow one could see
Anatol and Max, in the persons of Joseph Schild¬
kraut and Walter Connolly, seated at another table,
waiting for yet another charmer, another scene in
which the mood, like life, never quite makes up its
mind whether to be lightly brooding or laughingly
tinged with sadness and regret.
Except in the scene before Anatole wedding, which
is almost pure farce, the threads of laughter and of
brooding are intertwined. The lines that smile have
a way of looking back into a past or forward into
a future that is not as smiling; words that are
melancholy are spoken so lightly, so fronically, that
they bring a smile. It is very hard, in the acting of
"Anatol," not to disentangle these two threads more
than they were meant to be, not to underline what
is funny and bear down upon or isolate what is not.
I suspect that in any playing of "Anatol it is the
more elusive and more serious side of it that will
suffer. Anything so sharply witty, so full of comi¬
surprises, will tempt the actors to play it for the
laugh. There is a tendency toward this in the
present production. Sometimes it goes even further
than a pardonable exaggeration.
In the character of Anatol there is now and then
a touch of the ridiculous which he himself acknow¬
edges. This "toy philosopher looks in the mirror
off and on and is amused, though what he sees there
is too personal for his amusement to be unalloyed.
Sometimes Mr. Schildkraut gets this admirably, as in
the scene called "Episode," where Anatol puts be¬
fore Max the collection of tiny parcels that are his
past. At other times, as in "Keepsakes," he seems
too much to be Mr. Schildkraut, the actor, making
fun, very obvious fun, of Anatol, the character
which, together with the way Miss Forrest insists on
crying, carries the scene away from Schnitzler to¬
ward the Hoboken manner of kidding revival.