John Van Druten and the Remnants of a Lost Era
THE PLAYWRIGHT John Van Druten has long since been forgotten, but he had a phenomenally successful career. He wrote twenty-eight plays, sixteen of them in London in the Twenties and Thirties and the others for Broadway in the Forties and Fifties. (He died in 1957, at the age of fifty-six.) Five of his dozen American plays were made into major motion pictures. For many years now, American theater has imposed an invisible boundary between popular entertainment and serious drama, but in Van Druten’s heyday, when a theater season was packed with new offerings, that line was blurry, and Van Druten, who was both a skillful technician and a highly literate writer, could work both sides of it. The plays that made his reputation were box-office successes, but critics valued him too: he won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle prize in 1952 (for I Am a Camera), and John Gassner included four of them in his Best American Plays anthologies. In the tradition of George S. Kaufman, Van Druten often directed the New York productions of his plays. He wrote or co-wrote eight movies, too, and the three I’ve seen are all notable: Night Must Fall (1937), based on Emlyn Williams’s thriller, with Robert Montgomery as a psychopath; Lucky Partners (1940), a romantic comedy with Ginger Rogers and Ronald Colman, derived from a film by the French writer-director Sacha Guitry; and, most famously, George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944), with Ingrid Bergman as the fragile Victorian whose husband (Charles Boyer) is trying to drive her insane. (Bergman deservedly won the Academy Award for her performance, and the screenplay Van Druten co-wrote with John Balderston and Walter Reisch was nominated.)
The only one of his English plays I was able to get hold of was , which was first produced in 1931 and has been revived both in the West End and off Broadway. (The estimable Mint
