Jane (adapted by S. N. Behrman from a Somerset Maugham short story) is an urbane but upsy-downsy drawing-room comedy. Its three acts of intended laughter rather suggest three sets of tennis, with Jane narrowly losing the match, 6-2, 1-6, 4-6. Jane (Edna Best) is a rich, frumpish, middle-aged Liverpool widow, hard of head and blunt of speech. In a jolly first act she descends on her London relatives to announce that she is marrying a penniless architect half her age. There is consternation, opposition, and the sense of a cheerful future for the play, if perhaps a checkered one for the heroine.

In Act II, Jane's talent for dropping hot bricks has apparently made her the rage of London, though nothing is actually shown but her incurring the rage of Londoners. There is no verve in it: things merely dribble along, with Jane tiring of society and the young husband tiring of Jane. In the last act, by flanking Jane with a worldly writer who might be Maugham (Basil Rathbone) and a philandering newspaper tycoon (Howard St. John), the play manages a few rallies, but never quite comes right.

Only the air of the drawing room persists to the end; despite Edna Best's smooth playing, the charm of Jane fades out. Halfway along, she stops seeming faintly absurd and at once stops seeming alive. And she doesn't cut a wide enough swath, cause enough contretemps, shake up enough lives. In the end, the strong point of the play seems almost as much comment as character.

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No playwright around these days can handle a comedy of manners better than S.N. Behrman, and it is a treat again to listen to a polished, witty dialog. He has put a lot of it into his comedy Jane." Conversationally, it sparkles a great deal of the time. But unfortunately its premise is frail and rather silly, and gets nowhere beyond engendering a certain genial warmth—certainly not enough to put the heat on the Coronet's box office for any protracted period.

Behrman's plot is based on a story of Somerset Maugham's about a middle-aged ugly duckling who belatedly takes on swan plumage. In this case, she is an elderly provincial widow who descends on a Mayfair menage and turns it end-over-end via sheer charm. She marries a lad half her age, lets him desert her, and angles herself into a third set of wedding bells with a tycoon as well known for his bedroom antics as for his ability as a publisher. Along the way, she serenely arranges the marital happiness of a niece, utterly confounds a meanish sister-in-law, and almost snares a cynical brother-in-law. All of which is accomplished in the most naively ingenious manner, even if it is quaintly unbelievable. It is, however, played for the most part on a wonderfully brittle, high-comedy plane by its principals.

Edna Best creates a delightful portrait of the guilefully guileless lady who charms by merely telling the truth. She is particularly adept at this type of comedy. Adept, also, is her co-star, Basil Rathbone. As a sort of bystander to the story, in which he gets involved in spite of himself, Rathbone plays one of Maugham's typical suave, cynical writing men.

You do not often meet a man with such a singularly continuous flow of wit, but Behrman has given him amusing things to say, and he gets all the best out of them. But it is Howard St. John's teaming with Miss Best which gives the play its best moments. The former's growing frustration as a self-confessed roue, as he falls under the lady's spell, are real high spots in an otherwise conversational evening.

Irene Browne contributes excellently as a Mayfair divorcee with all the silly conceits and deceits of her class, and Philip Friend plays the selfish young husband who walks out on Jane with a fine relish. Adrienne Corri and William Whitman pair adequately in the secondary love interests which is the basis of the frail plot.

Having knowing players to work with, plus a high-comedy perception of his own, Cyril Ritchard has staged these drawing-room doings effectively, although there are considerable stretches of chit-chat that get his inventiveness down.
The Theater Guild has given "Jane" a plush production, with a high-power Hyde Park drawing-room background by Elfi von Kantzow who is also responsible for costumes, except those supplied for Miss Best's metamorphosis by Valentina. It is too bad that there is not a better play to go with it all.
 

Difficult Task

Although he is a brilliant playwright, he did not want to dramatize it himself because he has long since quit the theatre, which is perhaps an even profounder demonstration of his canniness. It looked to me like an attractive job but it was very hard to do. The theatre is the most naked of mediums; it is a two-and-a-half-hour close-up, and questions which Maugham never had to answer—nor even to raise—in the compass of a short story, pop up uncomfortably when you come to write a play. Why does a sensible woman like Jane marry a man so much younger? Maugham describes her as witty and as making a sensation by always telling the truth. Nice work if you can get it!

Also, and this is the nub, instead of the young man's eventually leaving Jane, as everyone predicts, Jane leaves the young man. This was a puzzler. Why? I gave this as much thought as Newton and Satan gave the apple—with somewhat less epochal results. One line gave the play to me and the answer. When Gilbert asks Jane why she is leaving him, she says: "Because you are too old for me!" This line was, originally, the curtain of Act Two, the climax of the play. In the prolonged neurasthenic hypochondria which constitutes a try-out tour, I allowed this line to be shifted to Act Three. The point I wanted to make in the play is that youth is a question of vitality, generosity, warmth and general sympathy in point of view. A stuffed shirt may be old at 20. Jane is alive and vital and will be young at 80.

For this venture, Behrman has turned to another high-handed writer of high comedy, by using as his theme W. Somerset Maugham's original story of the same name as his theme. Completely delightful and entirely amusing, Behrman has made his lady of the title warm and human even if she isn't real. But there isn't enough overall substance to last a full-length theater evening, nor does the comedy build into any lasting crescendo to make for any sort of sustained sock to take "Jane" out of its present element of lightness that leaves a pew sitter with a singularly empty feeling.

Story-wise, there isn't much to tell. But Behrman takes a lot of words—too many—to tell the tale of "Jane," the dowdy provincial woman who comes to London to visit her sister-in-law. Capturing the fancy of a man young enough to be her son rather than her husband, the country widow subsequently undergoes a complete transformation physically. But while she loses her Queen Victoria luster, she never loses her capacity for telling the truth—even to the loss of a husband—and in turn wins the heart of a newspaper publisher who loses his confidence as a rake and philanderer once he falls under her spell.

It is Edna Best, as Jane, and Howard St. John, as the hard-drinking and romantically inclined publisher, who provide the play with its highest moments both in character and in comedy. Both score decisively.

Basil Rathbone, who plays the "I" of the original short story, a writer named William Tower, is supposed to have surface resemblances to Maugham, but seems ill at ease with the part. Nor is he able to capture the comedy spirit of the play. Primarily he is Basil Rathbone playing at being the carefree, colorful writer-world-traveler who comes back to visit a divorced wife, only to fall in love with his sister-in-law, Jane. And his biggest miss is when he comes in second best in the race for the latter's hand. . . .

As a whole, the casting and acting is excellent, with Cyril Ritchard establishing a tempo that moves plausibly even if the verbiage tends to slow it down in too many spots. . . . It must be said that "Jane" tries hard and with good intentions. But good intentions are not enough to jam a box office window.