Save in the deepest extremities of wartime austerity, this department has never yet attended a dinner where at least the main course, were it red meat, did not make its appearance inviolate from the carving knife, at least for temporary purposes of display, or, if it were game birds, they did not come roast, broiled, or whatever, in their proper edible entirety. It has universally, too, been the custom at such festive times to select a fish of noble proportions, salmon, sturgeon, or other finny personalities of distinguished appearance to make their state entrance as the first substantial course of the meal.
Now, apparently, either the individuals charged with the arrangement of gustatory ceremonies are so indifferent to the appearance of their table or the banquet departments of our hotels are so avaricious as to fob off on even their most expensive customers such indifferent food that guests at state dinners find themselves splashing around in stews and ragouts complemented by thin slices of pork sausage. Could not the Waldorf, for one dinner at least, go to the effort of running up a few whole Canadian salmon, a half-dozen whole roast baby lambs, and serve a Kentucky ham with the salad? It would make a better impression on the guests.
To a theater season of almost incredible shabbiness and which produced no single new play of any distinction whatsoever with the vaguely possible exception of Miss Lillian Hellman's melodrama, Another Part of the Forest, John Gielgud's hilarious production of Love for Love put an elegant and satisfying period. Everything about this revival of Congreve's rather staggering and bawdy farce was just right. It was wittily spoken, delicately contrived, and sumptuously upholstered and, as a final panache to the season, the first-night audience embraced every resident member of Manhattan's glitter set socked to the teeth in their this-year's diamonds and premature suntans from the Atlantic Beach Club. As Mary Martin remarked during the intermission, the entire evening was a sort of command performance at court of something by Avery Hopwood and, indeed, there were moments when it all seemed very like Up in Mabel's Room done in knee breeches.
The internal dramatic economy of Congreve is nothing to be approached after even a reasonable dinner at Jack and Charlie's, but Mr. Gielgud's company of dressy mummers played up the script's broad aspects without being slapstick, and the fine Restoration bawdiness which contrived to get everyone concerned in bed with the wrong person at least once during the evening was accentuated without anything more than a fundamental vulgarity.
So far as it was possible to observe with Love for Love as a text, life in fashionable London in the reign of the Merry Monarch differed from life in fashionable New York at the current merry moment only by the presence of astrologers and gentlemen carrying muffs. Indeed it was impossible not to identify the various members of the cast with various Manhattan characters in the audience, which gave the play the double advantage of being at once bitchy and a classic. It is, of course, the veriest cliché to remark how “modern” an “old” play often appears in revival, but Love for Love amply demonstrates the circumstance, and the cliché must stand.
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