THE THEATRE
NEW-OLD AND OLD-NEW
ArrEa the ordinary curtain has gone up, at the Ambassadors Theatre, the audience is confronted by an extraordinary one, which displays a crescent of London houses, beset by demons in red. The windows of " Anyhouse," which turns out to be nothing but the residence of the eccentric Blaize family, are picked out, one after another, by an elfin glimmer, indicating the floor reserved for each episode of the play. Thus are we warned of the seriousness of the playwright's purpose, and led to expect and to fear that her House is to have a symbolic importance.
Sure enough, when the play begins, we are allowed to escape none of the floors and hardly any of the rooms. After a negligible scene on the doorstep (postman, milkman and Irish kitchen-maid) we proceed, from the ground-floor dining- room, where the Blaize family are sulking over the remnants of breakfast, to the attic, where the unmarried, expectant- mother, house-parlourmaid is regretting her detection, but not repenting her " sin" and then we go down to the first-flOor drawing-room, where there is to be a dinner-party to celebrate the engagement of the beautiful, sullen Miss Blaize (Miss Hilda Moore) to a man she finds she can't marry when he tries to kiss her ; and, next, to the kitchen, where we meet the usual cook, the expectant unmarried father (hired to wait for the night) and both maids again. And so, after more of the drawing-room, to the doorstep. A surveyor couldn't be more thorough !
All this insistence upon floors helps, of course, to exhibit the merely architectural separation of morally equal classes, behind the numbered front door. No doubt it is also intended to illustrate the beautiful, sullen Miss Blaize's not very new idea that, if you could strip the facades off monotonous rows of dwellings, you would see hundreds of thousands of little people doing mechanical things, like dolls.
So you might ; but would you, in many streets, find them doing and suffering such odd things as the Blaize family suffered and did ? Would you find " Religion, Science, and Business under the one roof of them so pessimistically typified as they are here Religion in Mrs. Blaize's Puritan conviction that anything one enjoys doing must be wrong ; Science in-a doddering grandfather-professor who thinks he has the clue to spontaneous generation ; Business—bad business—in father Blaize, who has failed to foresee a fluctuation of wholesale prices, and so, being ruined, is anxious to get his daughter married to another business man whose firm is " solid as a rock ". ?
We cannot believe in the normality of these personifications. Nor can we take seriously the philosophy of another Mr. Blaize who arrives (in rags) from the colonies, and discovers that, in addition to Religion, Science and Business, Past and Future lurk in this depressing House.
The colonial Mr. Blaize apparently believes that sincerity and vitality, as opposed to pretence and death-in-life, are revealed by an all-round violence of action, or else by a splenetic discontent with domestic duties. He has evidently misread Nietzsche (" live dangerously ! ") and Ibsen (without having studied " Iledda Gabler," however), and he regards a physical and-mental breaking-loose as a symptom of spiritual health. A bit of the lively future, for him, is the vehement Socialist who enters with an intention, not so much of robbing, as of enforcing crude ideas at the revolver-point. This Socialist is so full of the future that he is weak in the organiza- tion of the present; and thinks to hold up and polish off at least five members of the Blaize family in one &Nue. Unfor- tunately, he is prevented by the sudden intrusion of the youngest of all the Blaizes who has been out to post some letters, and defeats the whole Bolshevik vision by the simple school-boy device of opening the drawing-room door upon the Socialist's back and oversetting him. Considerable turmoils can be cut short by trivial incidents. And we end (on the doorstep) with the Present (or the police) removing the Socialist (or the Future) while the Blaize family remain, morally revolutionized by these explosions.
Miss Tennyson Jesse, as you see, has written a new sort of play round a set of very old ideas, and it would have been better had she determined to be uniformly satirical, or else consistently melodramatic, and left the ideas out. We are sorry that she has wasted a good deal of clever dialogue upon so much ill-considered philosophy. And, after this dose of the new-old, we are in the mood to welcome the old-new, given us by Mr. Alfred Sutro at Wyndham's.
The critics have complained that this " Man With a Heart" is old-fashioned. Yet it is polished up by a competent work- manship, as that used to be understood in the days of " well- made " dramas. Such dramas used, you may remember, to begin rather slowly, so as to give fidgety audiences plenty of time to get seated, and in these impatient days one rebels a little against Mr. Sutro's delaying introduction. But it was always the way of the well-made play to administer interest in gradually increasing doses ; so that, in this instance, one whole act must be spent, amidst introductory chatter, in letting us 'know that the hero-husband is a philanderer ; another act in letting us see him philandering, in the dangerous air of " a French summer resort," to which husband and wife have come for a holiday. And he, perhaps, to escape from the ladies who pursue him ? For he's a good sort, and irresistible, being Sir Gerald du Maurier. Interest develops ; a third act brings big scenes between wife (Miss Marie Lahr) and rival " flirts " of husband ; a fourth, the final big scene of recon- ciliation between husband and wife. One recognizes the rhythm of it all ; multitudinous, dispersed at the outset, narrowing to a masterly duo at the close. The " old- fashioned " point of view peeps out in the immense to-do made because the lovable but too indiscriminately loving, husband is seen leaving the room of one of the rival ladies precisely at 3.15 a.m. Why, next day, the whole summer resort knows about it ! • This Annecy was no place for philandering. Husband and wife must be reconciled in safe old London, where they settle down in recovered joy, as everybody. used to do, in days when the well-made drama worked through its lingering preparations to its third-act climax, and then declined and fell into legitimate embracements, as the curtain came down, and the hansom cabs were whistled up the street, to take a satisfied audience home.
R. J.
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