One hesitates to describe the new Guild offering at the Hollis. "Wings Over Europe" as an intellectual drama with an all male cast, for there is no surer way of doing one's two cents worth toward keeping the mobs from the box office. It is best to add that intellectual describes only its lasting appeal, though as it reaches you over the footlights the appeal is primarily emotional, and that its womanlessness arises simply because the play is concerned with atomic rather than the usual spermatozoic processes.

It is to an audience reasonably sophisticated that Maurice Browne and Robert Nichols address their play about the Shelleyan young physicist who discovers the secret of the atom, and causes an upheaval in the cabinet chamber at 10 Downing Street by his presentation of the consequences thereof. And perhaps in this play more than in most others, one is acutely conscious of the author's difficulties. The time of the play is tomorrow, and certainly any solution but the scientific one of a cosmological problem, and one which seems as valid as this, strikes an excitement-craving audience as a lame solution indeed. But Messrs, Nichols and Browne lay no claims to clairvoyance, and would probably be the first to admit that their play is incomplete because a human creation, and that their first act is the most valuable.

At the end of Act I you are left wondering how the problem is to be solved, half hoping that it will be, yet knowing that the attainment of a god-like objectivity would first be necessary. And, sure enough, Acts II and III leave the "drame a these", and rely purely on their value as good theatre to carry them over. As theatre they go over, but what gave promise of being a problem play that would not soon be outdated by the quick solution of the problem in the world outside the theatre, turns into a rather good melodrama whose prime fault is that its personal basis in the second and third acts seems woefully insignificant after its cosmic one in the first.

The Theatre Guild has shined up this unusual play with the rare Guild polish, and makes of it definitely one of the better things in the contemporary theatre. It aims higher than anything that has been done recently, and even in falling short of its aim, it still reaches an exhilarating and breath-taking altitude.