Enoch Soames is a minor poet who makes a pact with the devil to spend a few hours in the library of the British Museum one hundred years in the future to learn how history will regard him.
[1] The Broadway production, directed by Gerald Freedman, began the first of ten previews on October 9, 1971 at the Royale Theatre.
The cast included Richard Kiley in the dual roles of Soames and Laider and Clive Revill as Beerbohm.
These comments lack the pithy bite of aphorisms, and as out-of-context fragments, they lose much of the slyly inflected wit that is one of the special pleasures of reading Beerbohm .
The deeper problem lies with Max himself, who was too much the fastidious dandy, too much the meticulous stylist, to serve as a vehicle for the broad, boisterous traffic of the stage.