STAGE AND SCREEN
The Theatre " Ding and Co." By C. K. Munro. At the Embassy A NEW play by Mr. Munro is an important event, and if it seems something of a disappointment it must still be given the careful consideration due to so distinguished a writer. His subject on this occasion is war, and its social and ethical effects upon the various members of a single group, who typify different methods of response to the same situation. The scene is laid in a house on the south coast, owned by- the politician Ding and his amiable and feckless brother (upon whom the play depends for comic relief of a curiously conventional kind), and inhabited by a miscellany of sons and nephews and a niece. When war is declared Lion and Tony and John join up automatically, their friend Fritz, who is a German, returns in haste to his country, abandoning the girl to whom he has just become engaged, and Hope's brother Robert, whose mother had been a German, remains behind as a conscientious objector. Ding is smugly dedicating himself to overwork at the War Office.
In the second act the war is at its height. The temporarily disrupted group is brought together again, but for Fritz who is fighting for his country, to show how the state of war has affected them. Lion, who has recently acquired the V.C., is at home on leave, together with John and Tony : all of them seem to have accepted their participation in the struggle as a matter of course, without giving much thought to the problematical justice of their cause. The disenchanted Hope retains some detachment from the hysteria of the moment., but has lost any valid self-confidence she has had together with her lover. Ding, who in peacetime had brought to his conduct in public life something of the ceremonious adherence to the proprieties that he maintained in his family circle, now sacrifices his principles daily to expediency, and systematically loses his soul to save his face. Robert still preserves scruples which prevent him from joining up, and the conflict between his point of view and that of the interests which Ding represents is displayed in a scene which is the most vivid in the play, however inconclusive we may think the arguments put forward on either side. Ultimately he surrenders to circumstances ands goes off to the front, where he is promptly killed by a poison-gas invented by his friend Fritz, and his sister Hope, caught also in the convention of the moment, allows herself to be married to Lion.
The third act shows the same group, or those of them that have survived, in the originafsetting. The war is over. Ding is still an evasive politician,.with the same livery of unctuous rectitude. Lion is a helpless cripple in a bath-chair, living on the charity of his uncle. He is a burden to everyone, and the only offer of employment for him comes from the ex-enemy Fritz, who, now that hostilities are over, has been welcomed in this country as an authority in lethal technique and given a highly salaried position in an armament factory. Even this opportunity is denied him because Hope has rediscovered her love for Fritz, and knows that the propinquity which acceptance of Fritz's offer would brhig, would be fatal to her resolution not to desert the husband to whom she is now completely indifferent. In an epilogue, after Lion's death, Fritz and Hope are married, and Ding delivers an oration commemorating the international significance of the event.
Mr. Munro's general theme is close to contemporary reality, though it cannot be claimed that the arguments he has lent his characters substantially enlarge our knowledge of the subject. This is not, of course, in itself an unrcdeemable offence : it may be an essential part of a dramatist's purpose to put only inconclusive and commonplace arguments into his characters' mouths, the more convincingly to establish a certain level of
reality : certainly we should have been surprised to find inspired pronouncements in this milieu. But character-
drawing has evidently not been a primary consideration with Mr. Munro on this occasion. What remains in the mind is less the impression of a number.of identifiable persons than the image of an atmosphere : we remember the compound, not its elements. Mr. Munro disappoints on two scores.
The acting of the play left much and the production almost
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