STAGE AND SCREEN
" The Maitlands." By Ronald Mackenzie. At Wyndham's Musical Chairs was an unforgettably good play. The Maitlands is little more than a moderate one. It is episodic and formless (the terms are coupled in criticism only because the play loses its form through the manner in which the effects of the episodes are dispersed), the satire is often arbitrary and sometimes cheap, its comedy occasionally degenerates into buffoonery (there is an amateur dramatic rehearsal and a noisy drunken scene), the ending is incon- sequent, confused and inconclusive. The play has been praised as exhibiting the characteristics of a symphony, and one may admit the pertinence of -the comparison if it is specified that the symphony is by Tchaikowsky.
What reconciles us in part to its defects is the deftness with which, in despite of them, the play creates and sustains its own atmosphere. The scene is set in Betworthy, the seaside town in which the Maitlands live. Mrs. Maitland is a muddled and humourless widow who has been left with a position to keep up (in what capacity is unspecified) and insufficient means to do so. With her live her niece Phyllis and her son Roger, a master at the local grammar school, whose ideals arc wilting under the pressure of discontent. Roger has a wife, to pay for whose holiday in the south of France he is coaching the son of an imbecile and decaying major. Phyllis likes living with her cousins so little that she contemplates marrying the major in question, who has the recommendations of a pension and an impending migration to London. The major's son Arnold is a half-wit.
Into this forbidding and discontented circle come Mrs. Maitland's younger son Jack, who is a rising actor, and a friend of Phyllis's called Joan Clareville, who is distinguished from the other characters by the possession of a charitable nature and a private income. Jack is unmarried and likely to remain so, but two years ago, when unsuccessful in his career and in need of help, he had a one-sided affair with Phyllis which he now decides to reopen, confident that any wounds which may now be inflicted will not be on him. He dis- suades her from marrying the major and 'Seduces her himself. Roger, in the meanwhile, has heard that his wife whom he has idealized has left him. He turns to Joan and suggests that they should go away together, and she—after an interval in which various misunderstandings arc resolved—consents.
Such is the position when the play's threads are drawn to- gether in the last act. Jack receives a telegram offering him an engagement in New York, and disappears without saying good-bye to the now conquered and dependent Phyllis. Roger's wife returns suddenly to find her husband embracing Joan, and when informed of the situation, retires to the next room with a revolver. She fails to kill herself, but Joan sees from Roger's concern that it will be to his wife and not to herself that her attempt will cede him.
The play has been criticized (unfairly, as it seems to me) on the score of improbability. To my mind its shortcomings consist not in a lack of plausibility (granted the premisses, the development, but for the ending, is logical enough) but in a lack of consequence. We find no difficulty in believing in the characters, but we have to make an effort to sustain our interest in them. If we remain concerned with what they feel, too much of the dialogue is trivial and unproductive to allow us to retain interest in what they say. Parts of the play are written markedly without economy, and one scene—that in which Roger and Major Luddington return suffering from a drinking bout—had the effect of checking the momentum of the play almost beyond recovery. The part of Roger did not give to Mr. Gielgud the opportunities he had as Joseph Schind- ler in Musical Chairs, and some of his playing had a thwarted and mechanical air. Mr. Jack Hawkins gave a vigorous por- trait of Jack Maitland, and Dame May Whitty's Mrs. Maitland fussed with accomplishment in the background. Good per- formances came from Miss Catherine Lacey and Mr. Cecil • Fowler, and a quite admirable one from Mr. Stephen Haggard, - whose portrait of Arnold Luddington remains in the mind as the chief distinction of a disappointing production.
DEREK VERSCHOYLE.
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