The Theatre
[" ONE MORE RIVER." BY ASHLEY DUKES. THE STAGE SOCIETY.]
PrasuiNG..its useful work, the Stage Society produced modern comedy in three acts," by Mr. Ashley Dukes, at beginning of this week.
Mr. Dukes modestly describes One More River as a " trifle " ; and that is just the word for it. Its " time " is placed in the future—unnecessarily, for period matters nothing in fantastic or " light " comedies ; the description we obligingly give to had farces. Mr. Dukes his taken up again the fairly faMiliar theme of a " home," a retreat, or a " private " bOarding- house for the divorced. In this house of rest-, " betWeen the visi and the absolute," bruised hearts and injured vanity can find shelter from curious friends and sympathetic relatives. Over bridge, tennis, or golf, on gravel soil, in a lofty situation, they are assured of congenial company and absolute discretion. Mrs. Pennant, calling herself Mrs. Pole, and pretending to be a Widow, presides ; with the assistance of a correct but compassionate steward, Ambrose, who makes love patron- isingly to the maid.''Azinisrose is something of a_character, the best laidical character play,- ienteatioui, "a the
attitudinizing ; and Mr. Ernest Thesiger gives him the requisite farcical touch. One feels that in spite of his base pursuit of Jane in her dusting, he is genuinely concerned to keep the home together, by keeping its inhabitants well and truly divorced. He admits no cowardly separation. But Mrs. Pennant (Miss Jeanne de Casalis) is a fraud—a coquette merely, who, one feels, hasn't taken the case of Pennant v. Pennant seriously. Of course her former husband will arrive in this paradise of the divorced ; and, of course, after certain fencing; and flirtations, he will be firm and will embrace Mrs. Pole— or Pennant. Why did they ever part ? Lovers' quarreLs ! That is Mr. Dukes' jolly view of these facile divorces of the future—leading inevitably to reconciliations.
And we get the Pennant story repeated, in substance, by that of Mrs. Mildmay (played with a delightful display of • perplexity by Miss Athenc Seyler) and of Christopher Mildmay (Mr. Malcolm Keen). Their quarrel is even more inexplicable than the other, for Mr. Mildmay is the mad bull type of husband ; he crashes into the home in search of his wife and proceeds to shock Ambrose by embracing her in the grounds. Around these principals play the usual caricatures and marionettes—a plethoric Colonel, best defined, perhaps, by his name, which is Spavin ; a tiresome Professor who has theories about divorce, and wants to play whist, though, if we are in the future, he might surely have lived into the age of bridge ; a prosaic, elderly Mrs. Peppercorn, who treats the home frankly as a hotel. I am unable to see anything original in these typ6 ; or (I confess) to be in the least interested in them. But what did interest me, the other day, was the problem of high-brow audiences, and of the plays put before them by select Societies.
The high-brows laugh, I found, nearly as loud as low-brows might do, when a man falls off a pouf ; when one speaker says " Ha, ha ! " derisively, and another echoes " Ha, ha ! " ; or when the Professor of the Whist Age suddenly develops agility and leaps over a sort of balustrade. So I concluded that all playgoers are much the same. High or low, their brows relax at a touch of the old tomfoolery—provided, at leagt, that the intellectuals imagine themselves to be in the right company and the right atmosphere. And they were assisted, in this instance, by Mr. Dukes' cleverness ; he has cast a thin veil of blank verse over his invention in order to give it an appearance of novelty ; just as in The Man With a Load of Mischief he concealed sentimentality and vague romance by the use of an odd Euphuistic language which some people called " style "—as though style were not inherent in the artist's treatment of the matter presented, but a sort Of plaster to be put on in finishing ; not the " man," in fact, but his clothes. The blank verse of One More River deliber- ately exhibits the conversational disintegration, with frequent overlappings, that marked the dramatists of the decline, in the late Caroline period. But it hardly counts ; for English actors can always be trusted to make the rhythm of verse sound as much like prose as possible, and here, no doubt, they were instructed to follow that safe rule. They managed so well that one was only occasionally aware that something was going wrong with the dialogue ; as one picks out verses in the prose of certain novelists who write poetry sans le savoir.
RICHARD JENNINGS.
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