The Pleasure of His Company

There are certain stage personas that middle-age, middle-class, middle-brow men and women will pay good money to see. One is the dashing international gypsy, suave and prestigious, something of a rascal, preferably done in a clipped British accent. Another is the brusque, dammit-to-hell type society woman, a kind of orthodox Auntie Mame, who bustles around and smokes like a man. The audience, of course, likes to dream themselves into the two for an evening. What the actors do while they walk around in these characters doesn't matter a whole lot.

So go things at the Wilbur this week. Cornelia Otis Skinner has collaborated with Samuel Taylor in such a play, The Pleasure of His Company, giving herself one role and Cyril Ritchard the other.

As the story goes, the man has a daughter off his first wife--the woman--and then has taken off for more heedless gaiety in Europe, marrying and divorcing regularly. After fifteen consecutive wanderjahre a cable catches up with him in Kenya, informing him that his daughter is going to marry. He rushes to the scene, snows the long time unseen daughter, piques the ex-wife, gripes the stepfather and disgruntles the groom. He wants to return to the Europe of his youth with his daughter in her mother's place just to prove he's as lively as he ever was.

To accomplish this he makes the young man look the lout he is, and draws beautiful pictures of what his and daughter's life in the Aegean could be. First she thinks he's kidding, then she takes him up on it and they leave, leaving the groom and the ex-wife in the lurch and feeling bad. The daughter says she will come back "a fulfilled woman."

All pretty thin stuff. The pleasure to be derived from Mr. Ritchard and company is like the pleasure from a professional ball game. The actions so perfect, all the flies snagged, precision done with ease. Ritchard, who looks as if he's been watching Rex Harrison, clearly had the part written for him and does it with a blinding polish. Miss Skinner is funny and of course an accomplished actress, but she's still much better on her own. Walter Abel acts suitably imposed upon as Ritchard's host. Charlie Ruggles makes an interesting character out of the dull role of Miss Skinner's father. The two young people, Dolores Hart and George Peppard, look pretty green next to first-rate comedy people; the girl is particularly stiff, but they are sincere.

It wouldn't be hard to guess that Ritchard also directed, since he has blocked himself downstage and as the locus of attention all the time, even when he should not be front and center. But it's a neat job of direction. There is some claptrap in the script, trying to impute deeper meanings to a few of the characters, but it's not bothersome. Also a lot of the jazzy repartee reminds one of an old Montgomery-Lombard movie.

That the play and its performances are admirably smooth and finished doesn't change the fact that the characters are a bunch of unlikely people calcuated to entertain. But then this is the business of the theatre.