SOME LITTLE PLAYS.
IF the Old Vic (of -Waterloo Road) is a theatre with a mission, the Lyric (of Hammersmith and Mr. Nigel Playfair)
may fairly be called a theatre with a pose. Both institutions have put their mark on our dramatic production. The appeal of the Old Vic being much the broader of the two,
-and being, in fact, made to all who have the love of drama
or of dramatic music somewhat deeply at heart, its influence has been proportionately greater. The Lyric has also attracted its special public. But it' would be rather hurt at the idea that its crowd had developed any violent enthusiasm about the theatre. You know (within a little) what to expect there—the style of the actors, the form of the entertainment, the response of the audience. But in all these things you perceive their highly eclectic character. If you are the right sort of person, you are chez nous ; if you arc not, you soon become sensible of being a trifle " out of it." To particularize a little, I should call the Lyric the home of the " rathers." In period you must be rather ante- Victorian, and in taste rather anti-Victorian ; you must be rather modish, but still literary ; you must rather like being shocked in an unsentimental, Middle to Modern British fashion, and you must 'be rather fantaisiste in your notions of stage costume and decoration. Given these conditions and qualities, Hanunersmith is decidedly the place for a happy evening.
Yet, to speak truth, this pose of the Lyric has become, as artifice is apt to do, a trifle attenuated. To pass from the Beggar's Opera (taking The Way of the World on the passage) to Midsummer Madness does not seem. to be quite in the right order of going ; it is like beginning with a stout Burgundy and going on to a pleasant but thin wine of the Cher. There are resemblances. In mere time, indeed, Pat Nolan (Pantaloon), the flirtatious stockbroker, is some centuries removed from Captain Macheath, the amorous highwayman ; but Mr. Ranalow, bluff and burly, is still costumed for the period, and, save that he bears a cane for a pair of horse pistols, might be taken for the redoubtable captain come to life again, and out for a midsummer frisk, Nevertheless, appearances are deceitful. Ten minutes of Midsummer Madness were enough to convince the audience at the Lyric that the bold mockery of the Beggar's Opera, with its scene of bustle and gay variety, was no more. The " bragian " captain and his hussies had sunk to four mummers in a Somerset tea-garden. The brass band had dwindled to a piccolo.
Midsummer Madness is a rehearsal play, with a garden for a stage, the players announcing themselves for the mimes they are, and not pretending to be real people. Mr. Bax takes three figures of the pantomime, adds a merry (but discreet) widow for a fourth, and by pairing off the widow with Pantaloon, and Columbine with Harlequin, and trans- ferring the widow to Harlequin and Columbine to Pantaloon, makes of this criss-cross of vagrant loves a pretty single-act diversion. Did I say a single act ? But there are three acts, and unless you write emotion, or irony, into the harlequinade, as one or two great artists have done, it is better written in one. Midsummer Madness is not a play of this type. It is a little play, fit for playing in a little theatre, to music, composed like Mr. Gibbs's, for a little orchestra. Now and then it almost decides to have a style, or to borrow one from Congreve. But for the most part its author and pro- ducer resolve, quite properly, to keep it an affair of marionettes. This, indeed, is the gesture which Mr. Ranalow (with the ghost of Captain Macheath a little disposed to haunt him) applies to it. I am sure Miss Marie Tempest would have done the same if an embarrassingly fond audience had allowed her. But as it was clear they were always pleading for a little more Marie Tempest, that lady was forced to gratify them with such sport as seeming to drive a golf ball, or to launch an arrow at an archery meeting. This was really the fault of Mr. Clifford Bax. He should have given Miss Tempest more to do.
For the rest, Mr. Gibbs's music is extremely pleasant, only it seemed a little shy and undramatic. As Mr. Bax's verse promised a witty or a satirical vein without keeping its word, so the musical accompaniment, with its reminiscent grace, seemed about to take_ on decision and originality of style and then, as if wanting encouragement, to die away into something like imitativeness .or irrelevance. Now and again it appeared to be fancifully, even beautifully, har- monized. But being very incidental, and not married to anything particular in the language or movement of the play,. its fine quality never fully emerged. What, in fact, the Lyric has missed is the opportunity of producing a new form of English satirical opera. None can say that the field is not open ; virtually it has lain untitled for a generation. But the husbandmen do not yet appear.
* * *
Mr. Richard Hughes's Comedy of Good and Evil, played at the Court Theatre by the Three Hundred Club, has nearly all the ingredients for the making of a remarkable play— imagination, humour, a sense of character, moments of beauty, and a distinction which not one in twenty of the plays now running in London can boast. And the story is a bizarre and charming one. A Welsh minister and his wife harbour a devil in the form of a beautiful child, because, as the Lord's enemies are ours too, we must, on strictly Christian grounds, love the devils. But the fiend repays their hospitality by presenting the minister's wife with a brand- new flesh and blood leg in exchange for her wooden one. The leg behaves as such a limb of Satan was bound to do. Clad in silk, with high heel and pointed toe, it prances and capers and curvets beside its sober fellow, to the dismay of the poor lady and the scandal of the neighbours. This is excellent fun, but the play, changing from fantasy to realism and from realisin to metaphysics with a guardian angel, finally loses all consistency of form. Mr. Hughes lacks a sense of the theatre, and he has yet to master the art of construction. But his mind works originally and in a pattern of considerable beauty.
On the same evening, at somewhere near midnight in a little Bloomsbury cabaret, was performed a one-act play by Signor Pirandello, called The Man with the Flower in Ms Mouth. It is practically a monologue. Two men meet in a café, one acting as a sympathetic chorus to the other. There Is no incident, no plot. The talk is a series of broken images, formed in an anguished mind driven to expression by the fear of approaching death. The play ends with the wretched man rising and pointing to the " flower," a pimple at the corner of his upper lip, the symptom of a mortal disease. Strindberg, greatest and most horrible of dramatic psycho.. logists, may have been Pirandello's model. At least the play shows more than a touch of Strindberg's demoniac power. H. W. M.
Previous page
