CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THEATRE
" Daphne Laureola." By James Bridie. (Wyndham's.)
THE first act of Mr. Bridie's new play takes place in a Soho Restaurant, Le Toit aux Pores, which is filled with the sort of con- temporary London characters with whom we are all too drearily familiar. But the restaurant also contains two persons sitting alone at adjacent tables, and who, by their silence in the early part of the scene, immediately arouse our interest. One of these persons is Dame Edith Evans, dressed in amber satin and thoughtfully drinking double brandies ; the other is an intense young Pole, who is reading a book. When Lady Pitts finally breaks her silence, it is to burst into song, and to follow this up with a violent monologue about life in general and her own origins in particular. Her drunken remarks cause the young Pole to fall romantically in love with her, and the monologue ends with Lady Pitts inviting everyone in the restaurant to tea at her house next day. The arrival of her chauffeur-guard, whose duty it is to look after Lady Pitts during her periods of dipsomania, completes the act.
The very skilful writing of this preliminary scene, added to the unexpected and topsy-turvy quality of much of it, seemed to me singularly promising. For a brief moment it looked as though Mr. Bridie had contrived a play which would prove philosophical as well as clever, and constitute a buoyant attack upon the mentality of the business-men, the spivs and the shop-girls in the restaurant. This moment of illusion did not survive the opening of the second act, when we meet Lady Pitts' invalid husband (Felix Aylmer), a worldly-wise but sentimental octogenarian deeply versed in clichés, and find that Lady Pitts herself is simply a middle-aged blonde woman who is rich, lives in Hampstead and drinks. With the arrival of the guests she has asked to tea (and forgotten all about) the humour and purpose of the play both become unbearably common- place, and we are left watching Dame Edith brilliantly sustaining a part far beneath her powers. In the third act the moral of the play becomes entirely clear—Lady Pitts, now a widow, has married the chauffeur. In a final speech in Le Toit aux Pores, she attacks the Pole and through him all young men for being foolish enough to imagine that any woman is a figure of romance.
There can seldom have been a successful play with a first act so misleading. Neither the title nor the irrelevant introduction of a pot of laurel can raise Daphne Laureola into the realms of symbolism, any more than the spectacular performance of Dame Edith, and the exceedingly sharp and''good acting of Mr. Peter Finch as the Pole, can prevent one froin being bored and then exasperated by this unctuous presentation of a set of platitudes. The exasperation we feel is born of real disappointment, for at the beginning of his play Mr. Bridie appeared to promise us something fresh, sensitive and profound; he clearly thought better of it. And perhaps the tempests f laughter from his delighted audience will seem to him an
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