Word: maughams
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Theatre Guild on the Air (Sun. 8:30 p.m., NBC). Somerset Maugham's Jane, with Edna Best, Michael Redgrave...
...Nash's lyrics are set to pleasant music, though none of the tunes is likely to stick with you as far as the subway station. One which might is Roll Along Sadie, a lively number which suggests that Anita Loss might have been kinder to Sadie Thompson than Somerset Maugham...
...Maugham tells of a young Englishman, smashed up for life in a plane accident, whose devoted wife and brother have fallen passionately in love and are having an affair. The hopeless cripple providentially dies-only for the nurse suddenly to insist that he was murdered. The rest of the play, while tracking down the not very elusive killer, seeks to justify both the adultery and (as it happens) the mercy killing...
...Maugham clearly believed in what he belabored-so clearly that The Sacred Flame comes off much less problem than sermon. There must, after all, be two sides to any really dramatic problem play. This one is not only too one-sided, but is so unheated by life and emotion that Maugham had to keep it going as a rather pallid murder mystery...
Worst of all, by using the formal rhythms of artificial comedy to set forth solemn cliches, The Sacred Flame comes off stilted prose rather than human talk, while the production deals in statuary rather than people. Maugham is a naturally neat writer; but the neatness, here, is that of an inferior toupee...