Melvin Peabody is an awesome, proud, defiant, defensive, embattled, embittered, eloquent and furious figure. Somebody should write a play about him.

And this is just what Irwin Shaw has failed to do in ["Children From Their Games"]…. He has fashioned a whale of a dramatic portrait, on the assumption that it constitutes a play.

It does not. A play must move—progress from here to there. The characters, once developed, must participate in either a purposeful action, or the construction of a point of view.

"Children From Their Games" eventually does bring Peabody out of his suicidal gloom and into a reminiscent escape from present misery. Through the help of an old friend, he is able to recall, or imagine, the image of happiness.

But this is too small a movement, and of too little consequence. It has not been worth the sustained fury of Melvin Peabody. Or...