STAGE AND SCREEN
THE THEATRE
"Can We Tell." By Robert Gore-Browne. At the New Thiatre
THE International Horseless Carriage Corporation supplied, according to the programme, the car in Act II; and looking back on the play I seem to find something symbolical of its quality in that staunch but antiquated machine. It was brightly paint&d ; it looked at once clumsy and ingenious; it was a slow mover ; it was the best that 1902 could produce.
Mr. Gore-Browne's play has eight scenes to it and is in more respects than one awfully like a Night-Starvation advertise- ment. It has something of the slow, inevitable fascination which those compositions exercise on the contemporary English. Its story is told with their directness and economy, and it shares with them a certain crudity of method. (Although I knew it to be physically impossible, I was always half expecting a great white ectoplasmic bubble to 'float out of Mr. Jack
Hawkins' mouth, wIth THINKS: "THIS MAY RUIN MY CAREER ! " printed across it. The Night-Starvation people don't, alas, go in for period stuff; but if they did, I am sure they would feel, with Mr. Gore-Browne, that a reference (in a scene. dated 1902) to "Dr. Jim" would be pointless without a couple of lines of dialogue explaining that the person in question is Dr. Jameson (the one who made the raid, in case we haven't got you there yet).
The big difference between Can We Tell and the Night- Starvation strips is—But perhaps you ought to know what
the play is about before we get on to the Higher Criticism. The central character is Tom Hollick, who starts as an assistant in a shop where they repair bicycles (1896) and ends up (1938) as Sir Totp, a motor magnate and a pillar—a rather wooden pillar, in spite of Mr. Hawkins' efforts—of public life. We begin by going right back to the night of his birth, to be shown at some length that he owed his whole existence t& the chance intrusion of a distinguished gynaecologist, who replaces the fuddled and incapable country doctor. We see him -again at the age of 19, mending a puncture for Miss Edna Best, whom chance (again) has thrown in his way With results which need not tax your powers of conjecture. Six years later the Hollicks are
looking for a house. By a most frightful fluke two surveyors—
real, live surveyors with real instruments on real tripods—turn up and the Hollicks learn where a new main road is going to run. This enables Tom to glimpse, as in a vision, the future of the Homeless Carriage which stands suggestively before him and to buy up a strip of road frontage. The next scene happens at his motor factory, on the eve of the Great War ; and in the course of it a slice of sheer luck (the nature of which I am ashamed to say I have forgotten) makes possible the settle- ment of a violent labour dispute. The War itself seems to have been a lucky break for our hero, for when we next meet the Hollicks (in 1923) they are furthering their social ambitions by giving a garden party, on which old Auntie Coincidence confers success at the eleventh hour. A year later she crops up again to save Tom from a disastrous infatuation with a smartie : which brings us on to a mellow scene in the London house of the con- temporary Sir Thomas. At the end of this, by an amazing fluke, the curtain falls.
Well, as you can see for yourselves, the big difference between Can We Tell and the Night-Starvation strips is that Mr.
Gore-Browne doesn't believe in Horlicks. Horlicks (he contends) cannot save us from getting the sack, or being a wallflower, or—in short—from failure. It is chance that decides these things ; life consists of cannoning from one coincidence to another, destiny is a kind of ducks-and-drakes in which the flattest stone, propelled by the strongest arm, is at the mercy of the masterless ripples across which it skips.
There is a good deal to be said for this theory, which is at any rate more ponderable than the concepts of the Night- Starvation school. And it has provided Mr. Gore-Browne with the philosophical basis of an entertaining though hardly a distinguished play. Miss Edna Best, the heroine of it, gives a wholly charming performance, beautifully timed and with more light and shade to it than has sometimes been the case with her too consistent nymphs ; and Miss Norah Howard plays her mother from the music halls with admirable élan. A pedestrian production heightens the illusion that we are listening to a play of a somewhat earlier epoch.
PETER FLEMING.
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