STAGE AND SCREEN
THE THEATRE
"The Revenger's Tragedy." By Cyril Tonmeur. A.D.C. and Marlowe Society, Cambridge Tire cunning complicated plot twists and turns and knots and unravels itself and is dismissed with a last snip of the scissors. Mandrakes shriek, skulls ogle, horns sprout on ducal foreheads, staring comets shake their bushy beards, masques disguise murders, tapers flare and gutter and instantly go out. There are grooms in the tilt-yard, panders on the stair, poisoners behind the arras, musk-cats and perfumed diseases in the bed- chamber. Now a virgin kneels in prayer, chaste as ice and pure as snow : now a bastard mutters, " Adultery is my nature ; I was begot after some gluttonous dinner " : now a stripling sinner jests with his executioner. A cunning ecstasy of the brain where terror knows no pity, where action crowded upon action denies all solitude, where blood will have blood and sudden death cuts off unnatural life, where all ambition is vanity and villains have the gift of tongues and criminals are inspired poets. " What a set ! What a world ! " as Matthew Arnold remarked of the occurrences of Shelley's private life. As we turn the pages of Webster, Marston and Tourneur we are at one moment listening spell-bound to Clytemnestra's exultant defiance over the bodies of her lord and his royal concubine, and the next, cheerfulness will break in and we might be following the fortunes of Rosalba and Prince Bulbo and the Countess Gruffanuff. How wholesome, one might say hearty, Shakespeare seems in comparison ! Desdemona stands mammering on about warm gloves and nourishing food ; a prime minister talks over the temptations of Paris with his faithful old retainer ; a royal butcher chats of senna and rhubarb with his Scots physician. Tourneur, it must be confessed, is sadly un-English.
Yet Lamb, "the frolic and the gentle," abandons himself to the illusion ; Swinburne swallows the play whole in the school library at Eton ; Mr. T. S. Eliot, who knows all there is to know about Jacobean blank verse, bids us give ear to the subtlety and brilliance of the technique.
The Marlowe Society since the War, apart from their productions of both the best known and the less appreciated Shakespearean tragedies, has given us the opportunity of making up our own minds about the dramatic methods and merits of the two Webster plays, of Edward II, of Volpone, of Arden of Feversham. Their present choice (in conjunction with the A.D.C.) is the most ambitious yet. It is clear, I think, that the play is unbelievably difficult to do, that it is very well worth doing, and that it is well but faintly done. It is difficult because, as with most of the plays outside of Shakespeare and Ben Janson it is not all of a piece. The plot which is baffling on paper seems effective and telling enough on the stage. But the transitions are often clumsy and abrupt ; the groundwork is frequently crude and careless. A fine speech will peter out in the middle ; the quick smart fence of dialogue lapses into uncouth couplets or distracting conceit. A hundred trivial moments, which pass the reader by, trip up the producer. Above all the part of Vendice requires a Hamlet and Flamineo rolled into one, and only Vendice can hold the play together. This Vendice is very safe, very sensitive, but he is not one who " bears on his own forehead the brands of Lucifer, the rebel, and of Cain, the assassin," to quote the historian of the Italian Renaissance. His moods are not sufficiently differentiated. He has more poetry than passion, more melancholy than fire, is more victim than villain. But it is a gallant effort. The play is worth doing because of the more than occasional splendours of rhetoric and poetry ; because apart from the scene which enthralled I„,amb there are at least two (the murder of the Duke and the final masque) of amazing power. It is well done, all things considered, because the general level of speaking (if not of acting) is high, the continuity is preserved, there are no affectations, and the permanent set of gallery and winding stair and inner stage and black curtains is admirably simple and effective. The production does not however make mad the guilty and appal the free. The grotesque and ironic humour collapsed at times into farce and laughter. Lussurioso enjoyed, Super- vacua exploited, Gratiana understood, and Spurio mastered their respective roles ; but the total effect on the first night was rather of grey ash than of hard gem-like flame.
GEORGE RYLANDS.
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