It is hard to tell what Christopher Fry's The Firstborn is about. The overall impression is of far-of solid stone-hewn figures in a somehow intensely pregnant atmosphere, speaking heavily, as from a tomb.

Hardly anyone on stage is fully human or alive, which may be the fault of Anthony Quayle's direction. As an actor with a grandiose voice, he himself can get away with a heavy, solid, nearly motionless style of acting, because his voice does most of the work. But no one else on stage, not even Katherine Cornell, who often visibly tries to compete with Quayle on a purely vocal, statuesque level, can get away with it.

Although large and even exciting actions go on--mostly off stage--the mood and tone remain rather static and distant, as if the characters on stage were dimly conscious that an audience 3000 years away was watching.

The play concerns the return of Moses to Egypt not in his old role of Egyptian prince and general but in his now passionately held role or Jew. Although staging great characters--Shaw's Caesar--can be an opportunity to demonstrate what made them great, Fry does not achieve this. Yet Fry does make Moses a magnetic leader, a man of inspiration, a man whose motives and courses of action, often at odds with practicality or common sense, are hard for others--and sometimes Moses himself--to understand. Despite all this, the audience develops as much sympathy for Fry's Pharaoh as for his Moses.

Katherine Cornell, as the royal mother-by-adoption of Moses, fulfills a stately role solidly. She moves very little--except her enormous eyelids--but very skillfully, and she delivers some of the play's few poetic lines--"We all belong to Egypt.../ Our lives to on the loom/And the land weaves."

Quayle's acting of Moses is powerful; were the role fuller his portrayal might be grandiose. Michael Strong, as Moses' brother Aaron, is remarkably bad; and Roddy McDowall, who is leaving the cast, was at best indifferent as Rameses.

The Firstborn is an interesting production, but not the theatrical event that many hoped it would be.