CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THEATRE
“Captain Carvallo." By Denis Cannan. (St. James's.)
MR. CANNAN calls his amusing play " a traditional comedy," a label whose significance escapes me. On the analogy of traditional airs in music it evolves fear—quite groundless, I am happy to say— of ye olde knocke aboute, with Captain Carvallo as a miles gloriosus and a lot of people draining huge cardboard goblets and falling over backwards amid loud, unprovoked laughter. It may, on the other hand, suggest that Mr Cannan has written his comedy in somebody else's tradition, and we certainly catch from time to time Shavian echoes—Darde, the psalm-singing saboteur, is, for instance, a farcical elaboration of Pastor Anderson in The Devil's Disciple, and there are certain more general similarities in approach. But whatever Mr. Cannan chooses to call his comedy it entertains us ; and that is what comedies are for.
Captain Carvallo, in the course of a modern war for which he is not very suitably dressed, is billeted on a comely but hitherto chaste farmer's wife whose husband is a devoted but impractical member of the local resistance. With his associate Winke, a biologist driven by somewhat Lysenkovian motives to provide him- self with the right sort of war record, Caspar Darde is made responsible for the assassination of Captain Carvallo. Reluctant to take so extreme a step, he decides to compromise by blowing up the Captain's billet in the stables during the Captain's absence ; and in order to ensure his absence it is necessary for Darde's wife to give Carvallo an assignation in her bedroom, where a good time is had by both. After this the play tails off in an aimless third act.
" Lightweight " is perhaps the epithet with which to qualify the praise which the author undoubtedly earns ;_skill and wit are there, but they somehow add up, in the end, to something a little less than one felt they were going to add up to. Lightweight is the word, too, for Mr. James Donald's Captain Carvallo—an attractive, assured performance, but one which leaves us thinking that this philosophical amorist had it in him to interest us more deeply than he does. Miss Diana Wynyard is delightful as the goat whose ardent and carefully modulated bleating attracts the tiger, Mr. Richard Goolden is unfailingly funny as her husband and Mr. Eder Finch, though he does not give the impression of being a natural comedian, does admirable work as the biologist. Mr. Anthony Pelby, who plays a small part well, revives what is to me the greatest unsolved mystery of the modern stage. Actors are taught to handle rapiers, claymores, stilettos, pistols and battle-axes as though to the manner born ; why do they never learn how to carry
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