From Our Theatre Correspondent
IT would take a column rather than a paragraph to do some justice to Paul Vincent Carroll's The Wise Have Not Spoken, at the King's, Hammersmith. It is a play with very great moments and a tremendous theme, and these, together with the present brilliant presentation, overshadow some dull and static patches as well as the Carroll illtemp& about to-day's Ireland However, the farm hand, Paddy Ardee (delightfully played in a Shakespearian clown manner by Stanford Holme), does point out that he was never employed at a more "shocking " place. The MacElroys have insanity in the family (another brilliant piece of acting by Ann Casson as the crazy Catherine), their farm is to be sold up. every evil of vested interest and clerical abuse seems to find its home there Let it all be taken as read, whether Carroll means it or nit, since dramatically it makes the perfect background for the theme of the play: whether a new and better world is to be brought about by the materialist frenzy of Francis MacElroy, the ex-International Brigadier, whose girls arc rifles and whose dream an eternal fighting on the barricades against all-corners, or by Sylvester Tiffney, a priest working as a farm hand because he was silenced by his bishop for his outspoken views. Basil C. Langton makes Francis lovable and appealing in spite of hie mad ideas (H. Tiffney can never get it out of his mind that Francis would have mude a perfect Jesuit!): but the MOM beautiful piece of acting is Lewis Casson's Tiffney, a bewildered. tired old saint who preaches love and dignity and nature, and cannot find them anywhere save in Christ. And the most moving and suggestive (in the proper sense!) play in London is held together by Renee Asherson as Una. the pure. child-like sister who loves them all, to he left alone in the end seeking her inspiration from Francis and Tiffney tying dead on their last barricade.