Cast- Katherine Cornell; Tyrone Power; Eva Condon; William Podmore; Christopher Plummer; Donald Harron

CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER (Count Peter Zichy)
Tours with Katherine Cornell in "The Constant Wife" and Edward Everett Horton in "Nina" introduced Toronto-born, Montreal-reared Christopher Plummer to American audiences. On Broadway he acted last season with Eva LeGalliene in "The Starcross Story" and earlier this year was Manchester, the Dublin dude in "Home Is The Hero". On television he has had leading roles for Studio One, Suspense, Broadway TV Theatre, The Web. The young actor joined a repertory theatre in Ottawa, and remained with it for four years. He has acted in Canandian productions of "Cymbeline" and Christopher Fry's "The Lady's Not For Burning", and has been active on radio in both English and French versions of classic and modern plays.

CHRISTOPHER FRY and "THE DARK IS LIGHT ENOUGH"
A master of words has entered the theatre: a juggler who plays with jewelled phrases, a jester whose bells jingle out saucy, captivating tunes that set the heart dancing." The English critic quoted was one of many to ring the praises of an extraordinary talent, nutured in obscurity for many years, suddenly when its owner was 42 to burst on London with the verse play, "The Lady's Not For Burning". Christopher Fry's fame and prestige really began with John Gielgud's production of this zestful spring story of medieval England, which Gielgud and Pamela Brown brought to New York for a season's run in 1950 following 300 performances in London.
"The Dark is Light Enough", a current hit at the Aldwych Theatre in London with Edith Evans starred, is the eighth of Fry's playhs to be performed in the United States. First came "A Phoenix Too Frequent" (1946), for a brief New York run in April, 1950, followed that November by "The Lady's Not For Burning". Just a few months previously its author had three plays staged in London in the space of a single week. They were "Venus Observed", an autumnal play commissioned by Laurence Olivier, which Rex Harrison and Lili Palmer were to do in New York a season later; "Ring Round the Moon", which Fry adapted from "L'Invitation au Chateau: by Jean Anouilh, and which Gilbert Miller brought soon afterwards to New York; and "The Boy With A Cart", a pageant about St. Cuthman of Sussex, which John Gielgud staged, and which a group of professional players did in Sunday chapel performances last season in New York. "Thor, With Angels", first performed in Canterbury Cathedral in 1948, was produced by Catholic University, Washington, in December, 1950. His most recent work, in serious vein, was "A Sleep of Prisoners", which had a New York engagement and subsequent tour in 1952, performed as was intended in churches.
His other plays include "The Tower", a pageant written for the Tewksbury Festival in 1939; "Thursday's Child", another pageant of that year, performed at London's Albert Hall; and "The Firstborn", a tragedy of Moses and Pharaoh, done by the B.B.C. in 1947.
Mr. Fry's newest projects are two adaptions from the French, both due for production in London early in 1955: "The Lark", Jean Anouilh's play about Joan of Arc, and "No War in Troy" by Jean Giraudoux.
With these plays, most of them published by Oxford University Press, Chrisopher Fry has won a unique place in the contemporary theatre and in dramatic literature. Along with T.S. Eliot in his country and Maxwell Anderson in ours, he is one of the few modern poets who have been successful in the theatre. His writing has not only wit, but sheer rollicking, exuberant fun. Heard in the theatre or read in the study, his plays, inevitably compared to those of Shaw and Ben Johnson, have a surging eloquence and richness of imagery wedded to serious metaphysical content, and his later works show an increasing awareness of dramatic unity.
A short, unobtrusive dark man with a high forehead, a finely chiselled nose, a darting smile and sparkling eys which give him the look of an irreverant priest, the poet-playwright, now 47, was born in Bristol. His father was a poor architect who spent his later years as an Anglican lay-preacher in the slums, never finding happiness, dying when Christopher was a small child. His mother, a member of a celebrated Quaker family, managed to give her son a good education, and the family survived "on faith mostly".
Very early Fry displayed a hankering for the theatre. A local paper gave him his first notice: "a lively and comely lad of tender years performed a hornpipe in the civic pageant". At his kindergarten he played the part of King Alfred in a costume play. At eleven he had written a farce, the next year a poem, at fourteen a verse-drama. At seventeen he wrote "Youth and the Peregrines", a fantastic triviality" which was to be his first produced play (1934). He tried his hand at teaching and tutoring for a year, but threw up this job to join a reperatory company, only to return to teaching for another two years. When he had saved ten pounds he became a kind of theatrical jack-of-all-trades, in turn secretary to a novelist then to a popular song-writer, magazine editor, writer of children's radio plays, cabaret entertainer . For a while he was actor and director with the Tunbridge Wells Repertory Company. A composer as well as a writer, Fry wrote "Pharaoh's March" when he was five, later composed music and lyrics for "Charlots' Revue", "She Shall Have Music" and "How Do, Princess?"
Although Christopher Fry now owns a town house facing London's Regent's Park Canal where Browning and Rankin lived, he and his wife, Phyllis Hart, a former journalist whom he married in 1935, and Tam, their son, still live in an old farm cottage in Shipton-under-Wychwood, a village near Oxford in the Cotswolds where the monastic poet William Langland of "Piers Plowman" fame was born circa 1330. Until recently the cottage, at the end of a rough, unsurfaced road where garden and meadow meet, had neither plumbing nor electricity and the rent was only six shillings a week. There Fry writes by lamplight, generally between ten at night and four in the morning, or else will climb for inspiration to the flat circle top of an old Roman mound nearby.
"A Sleep of Prisoners" revealed Fry as a pacifist. In that play he showed that in a kingdom of peace man can find escape from his will to self-destruction. As a Quaker he refused to bear arms during World War II; he was assigned to a Pioneer Corps outfit and gave his war effort to cleaning ujp rubble all over England, taking mud to barges and working in limestone quarries.
Perhaps this explains the "butterfly" of "The Dark Is Light Enough", the seeming fragile Countess who lets no obstacle, danger nor weather bar her from her determined course, to prove, as Saturday Review critic Henry Hewes wrote of this extraordinarily wise and compassionate woman, "that the good in the worst of us is as valuable as the good in the best of us". Says Christopher Fry:
"There is an angle of experience where the dark is distilled into light: either here or hereafter, in or out of
time: where our tragic fate finds itself with perfect pitch, and goes straight to the key which creation was
composed in. And comedy serves and reaches out to this experience. It says, in effect, that, groaning
as we may be, we move in the figure of a dance, and, so moving, we trace the outline of the mystery."