THE THEATRE
UNREAL REALISM
MR. GALSWORTHY AND MR. ZANGWILL.
IF a stranger, ignorant of Mr. Galsworthy, were to stray by chance into the St. Martin's Theatre for a performance of The Show, he would think he had come upon one of our thrilling detective dramas, obviously written backwards, with a mystery reserved for revelation in the last act. He would perhaps not recognize his mistake until the end. Then he would be dismally disappointed with the mystery, which turns out to be no more than a letter left behind him by the distinguished airman who has committed suicide before the curtain rises. There is "nothing in" the letter. It explains that the poor fellow killed himself (as merciful juries so often announce that unhappy people do) because he was, e, feared soon to be, "of unsound mind."
Why did he not leave the letter for his wife, or for his mother who, in Miss Haidee Wright's strange crabbed utter- ance, proclaims that "nobody shall think lightly" of her Son? Failing these, there was his father-in-law, a dug-out who "does not belong to these times," as you know at once, without needing to be told it, when you hear him muttering about the North-West frontier and grudgingly admitting the merits of an Air Force officer who ought to have been in the Army. There was even the parlourmaid or the cook, both prompted by a pardonable and pitying curiosity. It would have been possible to communicate with any of these.
I am afraid that the suicide wrote his letter to a naval officer, remote from London, only in order that Mr. Galsworthy might keep its Contents out of the plot until the last moment. For had it been there to hand to the detective, this hard- . faced man would have had no excuse for treating all the members of the afflicted household, from wife to parlour- maid, and from wife's lover to dead husband's mistress, as half-convicted murderers. Nor would a young reporter, prompted by an editor who talks an uncomMon Fleet Street cant about his "duty to the public "—meaning his big net sales—have been able to plunge easily in and out of the dead man's sitting-room, and to organize a side-track investigation on his own : all of which constitutes The Show, or the working up and advertising of a "good story "—as editors really do sometimes say. But, of course, by now, our ignorant playgoer from the wilder provinces has dis- covered that Mr. Galsworthy does not write detective dramas, and that he wants us to condemn, not the editor and the reporter, not -the detective even, still less the parlourmaid and the cook, but the human trait common to that collective monster, the public—idle curiosity about the affairs of others, especially when curiosity entails the suffering of wife's father, husband's mother, husband's mistress, her father, and all those who might never have been involved, had that letter been left on the study table, instead of being sent so many miles away.
Well, it is a good thesis. Why does it not " carry " so swiftly, so unpretentiously, so inevitably, as do those in several of Mr. Galsworthy's other fatalistic plays, where everything turns to ill, though nothing is anybody's fault ?
Probably because he has not chosen, this time, a sufficiently plausible set of facts to justify his carefully subdued indig- nation. The facts seem to be inaccurately represented by that bullying detective, that plunging reporter. Do not Jet us pretend that there is nothing wrong with legal methods and Press publicity ! Too many eases, in recent months, have advertised the clumsiness of these " servants " of the millions of dolts who watch them. Let us only say that here Mr. Galsworthy seems, a little fretfully, to twist his story to fit his moral ; that it is rather a dull story, drearily told ; and that some of the episodes read like parodies of his typical manner—for example, the scene in the jury's retiring room, where each juryman " speaks " for his pro- fession: one as a chemist, another as a business man, a Third as a veterinary surgeon. The silent ones may have included an undertaker. But we were glad to be spared his point of view. . . . The realism of this scene cannot be coin- pared favourably with that of such earlier achievements as the magistrate's court in The Silver Box, the criminal court in Justice, the various Directors' or Board Room Meetings in Strife, The Forest and Old English ; or even the clubmen's consultation in Loyalties. And it is always fatal to Mr. Galsworthy's purpose that his incidents and characters should seem unreal ; for then we are not stirred to social repentance by his thesis. We have to fall back upon his plot, which, as I have said, is monotonous and mechanical in The Show.
But the edge of Mr. Galsworthy's observation seems, by contrast, unerringly sharp and biting when you go from the St. Martin's to the New Theatre and listen to Mr. Zangwill, as (once more) he contrasts pre-War and post-War generations in We Moderns. His older generation is unmistakably aged ; but not very admirable. When, after a very good dinner, the anti-modernist father uses the phrase "Penniless be damned !" he immediately displays his old-world courtesy by a Beg pardon, my dear," to his wife. That is the sort of old-world gentleman he is. And she is the sort of old lady who weeps when her husband gets a knighthood and thinks well of a " penniless " but irreproachable young man only when he secures a well-paid job. I cannot tied these two very much more charming, morally, than their silly, conceited, yet quite old-fashioned, children : the boy who paints portraits of young hussies dressed as mermaids out of Heine—'hat young painter, however incompetent, would do that now- adays ?—and the girl who talks about everything, realizes nothing, and has her head full of Dante and Beatrice, like any pre-Raphaelite maiden of the eighteen-seventies. She is also an animated book of unlikely familiar quotations, and her choke of extracts includes Keats, Omar Khayyam, George Eliot, Mrs. Meynell, Heine, Byron, and, I think, Longfellow. Incredible ! What has become of her Miss Sitwell and her T. S. Eliot ? Mr. Zangwill, one dares to Say, has not met the , younger. generation. Or if he has, he unfortunately, and unconsciously refutes his own argument that the older people really understand the young and can convert and manage them by a little discipline and common sense. I regret alt the more to have to say that his play is very amateurishly acted—with the exception of Miss Dora ' Gregory as a pipe-smoking woman journalist—because this is the first West-End production by Mr. Robert Atkins, to whom we all owe so much for his admirable work at the
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