The large cast that faced a Boston first-night audience last evening has a difficult task. It must present characters to an audience which has formed preconceived notions from reading the famous novel by J. B. Priestly. The name of the book has at once brought people to the theatre, and made them critical. In spite of this and other handicaps, however, "The Good Companions" proved the success of their play as a whole by drawing prolonged applause.

Realizing that no tightly-knit piece could be made of Mr. Priestly's rambling and episodic story, the producers have adopted a cinematic technique by which they wander all over England in sixteen scenes. These are well thought out and deftly managed in performance.

The story begins a little slowly in the shabby dwelling of Jess Oakroyd, a carpenter and joiner out of a job; but it doesn't take long to start Jess on the highway in search of adventure and employment. This deliciously slow provincial Englishman, with his aromatic pipe and pungent quips, wanders into a troup of third-rate travelling players and becomes their stage carpenter and jack-of-all-trades. But besides propping up scenery for the troupe, he sustains the whole show for the Boston audience. The troupe has been further augmented by Young Love, male and female. And when Young Love lapses into trite interludes that have had cousins, not to say twin sisters, in every theatrical season, Old Jess saunters on in his shirt-sleeves to put his own salt into the show.

Thanks to Jess, the interest rises as it should throughout the first act, at the end of which the little troupe gives a dinner in some provincial hotel to toast the new young blood and rename the troupe "The Good Companions." The last scene of the act comes off splendidly. There is an authentic esprit-de-corps to this ill-assorted group of broken-down actors and novices, a rather poignant spirit that can be recalled in parallel scenes in "Trelawney of the Wells."

But the final act is anticlimatic. Though it takes Jess back to his dingy home again, while managing to make his crazy adventures of the troupe seem a dream, it never gives a final accounting for the members of the troupe that are left. To be sure, they have been laid low by tomatoes in a theatre too dismal to boast grapefruit; they have lost a hero and heroine to the London stage; and they have lost Jess, but somehow the corporate ghost of "The Good Companions" lives on and is not to be laid without special attention from the playwright. The audience never knows what happens to the old veterans. Instead, the curtain falls on Jess as he starts off for Canada, saw and hammer in hand, for new adventure.