PLAYGOER

"Shakespeare should be seen and not read" has become as much an epigram in the lecture-hall as "Children should be seen and not heard" in the drawing room. Of course both axioms are vigorously hedged: Shakespeare should be read, too, just as children should occasionally be heard. But reading "The Winter's Tale" before seeing the current grandiose and interpretively satisfactory Theatre Guild production is less profitable and less necessary than is reading, say, "The Tempest" before seeing a stylized Margaret Webster job.

"The Winter's Tale" is one of Shakespeare's quite minor comedies, despite the major effort now on the boards. The present production ambitiously leaves the book almost intact, and expensively surrounds it with more drapery and costumed elaboration (credit Stewart Chaney) than theatre-goers have seen in a month of twelfth-nights.

Henry Daniell (as Leontes, King of Sicilia), Florence Reed (as Pauline, wife to Antigonus), Jessie Royce Landis (who plays Hermione, wife to King Leontes), and others are experienced players and do a good job. But it is not enough to take "The Winter's Tale" out of a rather academic classification.

The fact is, "The Winter's Tale" just isn't a good play. If Shakespeare's name weren't on it, nobody would pay any attention to this stock, five-act, heavy "comedy," which not only misses its classical unity of time by 16 years, but loses faith with its audience by reviving the dead.

"The Winter's Tale" has some humorous episodes, competent acting, and very beautiful settings, but with such great products of the Shakespearean pen as "Henry IV" and "King Lear" begging for revival, it seems trivially inauspicious for a Theatre Guild production. jgt