Maurice Evans and Edna Best change their peace from a mismatched couple filled with hate for each other, in the first one-act play of Terrance Rattigan's "Double Bill," to a madcap theatrical team in the second.

"The Browning Version," which opens the evening, seemed to me the more successful of the two. It is a very interesting, if leisurely paced show, with deft touches of understated humor and sensitivity. Evans plays an austere and reserved master of the Classics in an English public school--"the Himmel of the Lower Fifth," as he is characterized by the headmaster. The play concerns the gradual eliciting of his emotions toward himself, his work and his promiscuous wife. A humorless man, he had been unable, throughout his career, to maintain the delicate balance between discipline and affability--taking refuge in a severity which was lightened only by dry puns. The climax occurs when a member of his alienated Greek class presents him, on his retirement, with a copy of Browning version of the "Agamemnon"--second hand--inscribed with a tender quote from Aeschulus. The master breaks into tears and later reveals his unrequitted attempts at winning the affection of his classes and his sexually unsatisfied wife.

Happily, Mr. Evans' operatic tendencies were not in evidence (except in the second play where they were quite in order), and he performed subtlely and sensitively, with his usual technical excellence. His wife, an equally complex but less developed character, was portrayed with understanding by Edna Best. A competent cast supported the stars in both plays.

The title of the second offering, a farce called "Harlequenade," seems to derive from the plays done by the Commedia del Arts in 13-15th century Italy. The actors then had no scripts, but improvised from a stock situation. An analogy would hold between one of these situations and the framework of a rehearsal of "Romeo and Juliet," in which Mr. Evans and Miss Best, as a famous and fabulous theatrical couple, play the title parts between miscellaneous interruptions in the course of the rehearsal. The play parodies the ingrown frame of mind often found in the theater where the world would seem to pivot on a chalk mark in the center of the stage. The humor, which is reminiscent of vandeville in its pacing and gags, stems from the contrast between life backstage and the rehearsing of Shakespeare's tragedy. Corny but amusing.