Mystery, he wrote

Vokes unearths Emlyn WilliamsÕs Someone Waiting

by Steve Vineberg

SOMEONE WAITING By Emlyn Williams. Directed by Richard G. McKenzie. Set designed by Robert H. Gibson. Lighting by Jason Freimark. With Glen Doyle, Richard Clark, Bob Sandler, Pauline Wright, Grainne Riney-McGimpsey, Mikki Lipsky, and Anne Noonan. At the Vokes Theatre, Wayland, through March 14.

The Vokes Players' choice to produce Emlyn Williams's Someone Waiting exemplifies an admirable impulse to

resurrect, once a season, a long-buried item from the theatrical past. (Last year, they revived Lillian Hellman's Montserrat.) The English actor-playwright Emlyn Williams was a West End phenomenon in the '30s and '40s. His work rarely sees the light of day now, though theater buffs may still recognize the titles of his two most successful plays. The Corn Is Green is a sentimental, rather affecting triumph-of-the-spirit drama in which a schoolteacher in a Welsh mining community discovers a prodigy; Bette Davis played the role, memorably, in the movie version. Night Must Fall is, I believe, more characteristic of his interests: it's a thriller about a sociopath (played by Williams himself on stage, and by Robert Montgomery and Albert Finney on screen) who, we realize fairly early on, plans to murder a helpless, wheelchair-bound old lady. Williams wrote several plays of this stripe, including A Murder Is Arranged and Someone Waiting.

I've never been overly fond of Night Must Fall, but compared to Someone Waiting it's a masterwork. In Someone Waiting, an amiable, somewhat eccentric fellow named Fenn (played by Glen Doyle) arrives at the home of a distinguished industrialist, John Nedlow (Richard Clark), and his wife, Vera (Pauline Wright), ostensibly to tutor their foster son Martin (Bob Sandler) for his law school exams. In truth, however, Fenn is the grieving father of Martin's best friend, whose hanging for the murder of a young woman -- which occurred in the Nedlow home -- is reported as the play opens. To the very last, the young man protested his innocence, and his father, convinced of it, has dedicated himself to uncovering the identity of the true murderer and bringing him to justice. The first task turns out to be amazingly easy. In about ten minutes' stage time, Fenn and Martin, to whom Fenn reveals himself, locate a letter that implicates Nedlow. But for some unconvincing reason Fenn decides that he can't just call the police and have the true killer arrested -- that the evidence won't hold up in court. His only recourse, he persuades Martin (who hates his adopted father), is to kill some other innocent young woman and frame Nedlow for the second crime.

I don't know about court, but the evidence certainly doesn't hold up on stage. The damning letter surfaces implausibly, wrapped up in a newspaper that Martin has inadvertently sent to Fenn himself, and which he's carrying around unknowingly in his suitcase. The night I saw the show, its sudden appearance drew disbelieving laughter from the audience. The plot is simply idiotic. Based on this play and Night Must Fall, I assume this is Williams's trademark structure: he sets up a murder and then focuses on how its seeming inevitability affects the characters. He may have thought he was sounding new depths in the thriller genre by tarting it up with an ominous, hovering-fate mood and a lot of glum-faced characters working their way toward third-act histrionics. But Someone Waiting isn't exactly Macbeth; the psychological revelations are about as convincing as they are on The Young and the Restless.

Richard G. McKenzie's production doesn't stint on the histrionics. Except for Anne Noonan, who has a brief role as Nedlow's secretary (and mistress), all the actors get to tackle big, fearful scenes. There's so much scenery chewing on the Vokes stage in this show that I was surprised to see any of Robert H. Gibson's set left standing by the final curtain. The last production at Vokes, City of Angels, was so deftly performed that the stiffness of the acting in Someone Waiting -- the terrible English accents and the pauses you could drive a train through -- came as a bit of a shock. A company creates or revises its own standards as it moves from show to show. It's a compliment to Vokes that, after City of Angels, I expected something better than Someone Waiting.