The Human Touch

son, who played the role of the Jew-hating Philip Talassos, should play Hitler some time and Isidor Cashier was no mean Vespasian either. Bearing in mind the usual lack of feminine pulchritude on the Yiddish stage, one was more than grateful to Judith Arbabanel for her brief appearance as Dorion. Coming from her lips Yiddish sounds like a language with almost musical qualities. But all this does not touch the crux of Mr. Schwartz’s problem. And here it is:

Feuchtwanger required something like four hundred and fifty closely printed pages to tell us the story of Josephus and the story of his times, in such diverse settings as Rome, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Magdala and Caesarae. Mr. Schwartz tried to put the whole book into a theatre evening. I am afraid that Mr. Schwartz was a little intimidated ### the reputation of the author and of the book. I am afraid that he did not fully employ his sense of the theatre to prune here and there, to select, to intensify. The tragedies of a dozen other persons cut across the major tragedy of Josephus, and blur the major interest. Hardly have you got your teeth into one scene that the lights are dimmed and you move off, to another scene. What was true of “Yoshe Kalb” is even more true of “Josephus”. You can find no fault with each individual scene, but the whole lacks the impact. Josephus, nobly and beautifully acted by Mr. Schwartz himself, does not engage our human sympathies. Even the burning of the Temple becomes reduced to a pot of fire in the wings which produces—smoke!