THE THEATRE.
" POLLY " AT THE KINGSWAY.
Tan title of the " Book of the Words " at the Kingsway Theatre reads " Polly, by John Gay and Clifford Bax." The names of the collaborators should have been reversed. Now, Mr. Clifford Bax is capable of very good stage work, but hero he has performed what to my mind must be characterized as prodigies of ineptitude. The plot has been entirely changed, the dialogue largely rewritten. Out of a play already a little less fresh and salt than The Beggar's Opera has been made a machine which the actors have to push along with might and main. I have the first edition of Gay's Polly before me as I write. Here we begin with an amusing prologue spoken, as in The Beggar's Opera, by the poet and a player. In the first scene we are plunged immedi- ately into a conversation between Mr. Ducat and Mrs. Diana Trapes. In the Kingsway version there is no prologue, and Mr. Ducat has to be awakened by Mrs. Trapes before they can begin to talk. In both versions this talk is of the lovely nymph that Mrs. Trapes insists that Mr. Ducat's position makes it essential that she shall procure for him. In the original Mr. Ducat and his wife are represented as figures
out of a Dryden comedy. I should have had them played as youngish people, she jealous and coquettish and rivalling her husband in rustic attempts at foppishness. At the Kingsway they are the stock pair—the ilirtatigus old man with a virago of a wife.
The next turn of the plot is the same in both versions : Mrs. Trapes tries to make Mr. Ducat buy Polly of her. Polly has come to Jamaica to try to find Macheath, and to her the Cunning Mrs. Diana represents the situation as that of waiting- maid to Mrs. Ducat. When the true situation is revealed Polly is disgusted, Mrs. Ducat furiously jealous. She promises to connive at Polly's escape, and to this end provides her with the uniform of a young lieutenant. All through these events have run the alarums incident to the fact that the European colony and the Indians who are their allies are threatened by an attack from pirates. The Europeans, represented by Mr. Ducat, are in no fighting humour. Nor, as it later turns out, are the pirates. Their leader is none other than Captain Macheath, now married to Jenny Diver. To please her and to keep out of the clutches of the many women who lay claim to him, Macheath has blackened his face and called himself Moran.
In the original version he continues in this disguise till at the end he is ha ged ; he remains our old friend, and if
a trifle less witty is at least consistently unrepentant. The serious relief to this somewhat bloodthirsty and blackguardly comedy is provided by the Indians and by the truly human and charming Polly. She has been improved upon in the sequel, and is the only person whose character has been genuinely developed. In Gay's original she is completely disgusted by the consistent perfidy, immorality and cowardice of the Europeans, and when Macheath is hanged she is left contemplating marriage with the Rousseauesque young Prince of the Indians, a person of noble if slightly impossible simplicity of heart and uprightness of character. But Mr. Bax has spoilt all this. He makes Macheath develop unnatural scruples and, most unconvincingly, lament his lost Polly. Surely with Macheath out of sight was always out of mind ? In the end, far from being hanged, he is re- united to her with incredible promises of reform and amend- ment. The whole effect is of ridiculous and deforming senti- mentality.
What has endeared The heggar's Opera to the post-War public is very largely its complete, almost shocking, lack of false sentiment. But a sort of woolly treatment has been accorded to Gay's poor musical comedy all along. Wit and continuity of plot are upon every possible occasion sacrificed to actors, business, dancing and chorus work. Mr. William Nicholson's decor is, on the whole, very good, though he has not nearly so much " period sense " as had Mr. Claud Lovat Fraser, nor in the matter of colour does he work with so clean a palette or such firm intention. The excellent line of the first scene is the best piece of visual work in the play.
Some of the dresses of the ladies of the town are attractive, but they are not differentiated and individual as in The Beggar's Opera. Was Mr. Nicholson haunted by the fact that the chorus ought not properly to be there at all ? There is not the same attention to detail and to period-probability (to coin a Teutonism) in the dresses of the pirates as there was in the highwaymen's clothes.
As to the acting, that, too, lacked inspiration and was always a little obvious and thoughtless, though never actively abomin-
able. Perhaps we might except from this opinion Mr. Pitt Chatham, the Macheath. Had he been given the unsugared version to act he might have done very well. As it was, the part was difficult in Its inconsistency and he made the best he could out of it.
On reading over what I have written, I think it too likely to give the idea to the reader that the Kingsway Polly is a
bad evening's amusement. Actually this is not so. Polly is, for instance, incomparably better than any of the usual musical comedies to be seen in London at the moment. But it is also much less perfect because it has aimed much higher.
To draw such distinctions is, indeed, one of the chief difficul- ties of criticism. How convenient if we could head a notice
of a book or play " Code A " or `• Code B " I Then how easy it would be to write in fulsome praise of such plays as The Lady of the Rose or The Cabaret Girl, and severely of Polly, without for one moment letting the reader be in doubt as to which was the better entertainment. The Lady of the Rose heads the class of B's. But though in my opinion Polly is some way down the A class, it yet possesses a dozen virtues which are not so much as imagined among the B's.
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