THEATRE
a Fires of Midsummer Eve." ' By Hermann Sudermann. (Embassy.)
Tim play is a good deal more important nowadays than the player. Nevertheless, there are a few players one would cheerfully go to see making silk purses out of sows' ears. Well in the forefront of these is Miss Yvonne. Mitchell, a young actress who gives the impres- sion of being most seriously dedicated to her art and who can at
times express the extremes of emotion in a manner that could fail to move only the stalest and most wrinkled of imaginations. Happily, in this new English version of Sudermann's Johannisfeuer she' has something more promising than a sow's ear to work on. The more obvious romanticism of the play may be something imposed from without, but the drama comes cleanly enough from the characters themselves. An East Prussian farmer (the play is set -in- the '80s) takes a boy and a girl into the family which he rules with an affectionate bluster—the boy, his nephew ; the girl, the daughter of a Lithuanian beggar-woman. The pair fall in love, and under the sultry sky of Midsummer their love is consummated. But the boy is betrothed tOthe landowner's daughter, and to preserve the happiness of the' household which has sheltered them the girl, Heimchen, must renounce him. On that note of unresolved pathos the play ends, effectively enough. The human comedy continues, while the outsider, the character born for tragedy, stifles her passion and gazes, as it were, through the thick plate-glass which separates her from the joys and sorrows of ordinary living..
The part of Heimchen is a good one for Miss Mitchell, who will surely astonish us all one day with a performance in which an infinity of emotional content is strictly, classically controlled. The greater weight of the drama rests on her shoulders (although there are fine performances by Mr. Reginald Dyson, Mr. Laurence Payne and Miss Adrienne Corri), and it is her emotional intensity which keeps it from' slumping into the more confused attitudes of northern-romantic-realism_ The faults in her performance derive without exception from abundance of intelligence and emotion, not from any paucity of either. What Miss Mitchell must do is not to strain further but to ease up, and one of these days she will delight us not only with her passion but also with that subtle variety of emphasis which is at the moment somewhat lacking. She can afford to distribute,ber gifts rather less lavishly. - •
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