" COLUMBINE," BY COMPTON MACKENZIE, AT THE KENNINGTON THEATRE (Twetve
DAYS ONLY).
IT was the rudest shock ! I am not an extreme Compton Mackenvieist, but I had read and esteemed Carnival. My companion had not. So I told her the story in the Kennington trans. We were therefore all attention to the little touches that led up to the tragedy. The waywardness and selfishness Of the young dilettante sculptor who does not love his ballet girl enough to marry her; Jenny Pearl, of the Orient Theatre, with the peroxide hair and the Brixton accent, who holds him so much too closely in her fastidious heart; the noisy, cheerful tea-party, the squalid " dressing-room of the first line girls of the Orient ballet" ; Jenny's disconsolate adventure after she has been jilted; her unhappy cynicism, and her rejection of the temporarily repentant sculptor. (" You can't mesa up a girl's life like that, and then come and say you're Sorry.") And then, in this preposterous play, Mr. Mackenzie goes and makes it end happily ! In the second act the young soulptor knocks the head off his clay model of Columbine. That is just what Mr. Mackenzie has done to his plot and his psychology. The brains are gone. Everything led up to the head—the ddnoilment, he has knocked it off, and so made the rest of the story nonsense. But the play has good points. Its local colour is most convincing, a good deal of it is moving, much of the rest amusing. It is decidedly a play to see. I prophesy that if the trial at Kenning• ton proves a success, and a West End theatre can be found for it, certain emendations will be made, the first ant and the waits will be cut down, the lighting of the tea-party some will be rather bright instead of dim, and the ballet girls in the third act will be given much more " business." Why can't they really do their hair and make up ? And how about that end ? Why should it be assumed that the theatre-going public is fifty per cent. sillier than the novel.reading public ? Won't Mr. Compton Mackenzie provide us with bath-towels for our tears and trust us with the real end ? Taint.
Previous page
