It is one of the humorous and ironic circumstances of the legitimate theater that Maxwell Anderson, who is forever having at drama reporters with halberds and dagonels, puts them now and then to rout, not with any frontal assault by arms, but by the simple and, apparently, unconsidered device of writing wonderful plays. Whenever he writes a perfect stinker and gets all fouled up with social consciousness and geopolitics and otherwise tries to unburden himself of personal life-force agonies, earning thereby the sneezes and yawns of all concerned, the man screams that he has been basely attacked and done in the eye with malice and capitalist treachery.
It is apparent at the Broadway moment that kind friends have taken him aside and persuaded him to wisdom, for in Anne of the Thousand Days he has done more to justify Anderson and confound his enemies than he ever accomplished by taking space in the public prints to complain that such rubbish as Truckline Café was thrown on the trash heap where it belonged because the drama critics had a personal mad on.
Anne of the Thousand Days is, mercifully, innocent of any bill of goods whatsoever and comes to the customers as a vastly exciting costume piece, beautifully written and, to the date this notice is being filed, far and away the outstanding business of the theater season. Somewhere along the line, Mr. Anderson, Hank Potter, who directed Anne, and Rex Harrison, who plays its leading role, have recaptured the elusive quality known as “theater” and have synthesized their various capacities to produce some unforgettable moments in an evening of almost pure pleasure for the customer.
The theme of this elaborately mounted and handsomely upholstered poetic melodrama is the interlude in the life of Henry VIII of Tudor England in which he married Anne Boleyn, his second wife, became the reluctant father of the future Queen Elizabeth, and discovered that kinging it is not all stag hunting and the lifting of handy petticoats. It has not been this department's fortune ever to see Henry impersonated on the speaking stage before Mr. Harrison, and there is, therefore, no available measuring stick for his performance, but it is difficult to imagine an actor who could invest the part with more kingly indecision, more royal authority, or more of the manly vigor for which Henry's name has been a synonym over the centuries. Not that the part isn't a setup, to a certain extent, by virtue of the Holbein portrait and the Tudor legend, but it seems to the reporter, as it did to every other Broadway reviewer, that Harrison let slip no opportunity of improving on both of these and evolving a characterization at once moving, terrifying, and provocative of what is technically known as “reader association.”
Until some even more effective theater notion comes to Mr. Anderson's attention, Anne is a far more valid claim to fame and attention than all the letters he can write to the Times about geopolitics, and it is widely hoped that its resounding success will be a lesson to him.
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