CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THE THEATRE
"Happy as Larry." By Donagh MacDonagh. (Mercury.)
IT is much easier to praise this play than to describe it. Four con- temporary tailors (who, except that their profession gives them an arbitrary and tenuous connection with the three Fates, might just as well have been grocers or sanitary inspectors or anything else) contrive to invade the past and to readjust the somewhat violent destinies of their great-grandparents. Larry, one of these forebears, was poisoned by a villainous doctor who has designs on Mrs. Larry, and it is when, Gertrude-like, she is yielding with unseemly alacrity to her husband's murderer that the twentieth-century tailors inter- vene and retaliate by poisoning the doctor. Only a blood-transfusion can save him, and Mrs. Larry, lost now to all decency, goes to draw the blood from the still-warm corpse of her husband. Her knife has the unexpected effect of restoring him to life, whereupon the wicked lady dies of shock and Larry is left free to console himself with a young widow whom in the first scene he had discovered fanning the wet clay upon her husband's grave, for she had pro- mised the departed not to remarry until the clay was dry.
As you can see, this is one of those plays which—like Mr. Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth—defies synopsis. It defies a good many other things, too ; but in such a debonair and engaging manner that forbidding epithets like " experimental" and " revolutionary .' never suggest themselves as applicable to a technique which, if used by a more solemn or self-conscious writer, would infallibly have earned both. Mr. MacDonagh gives the impression of writing for fun. Without apology, without ostentations and with complete success, he has written his play in verse—not the stark, portentous stuff that you rather expect these days, but flowing, musical, variegated lines which gallop and curvet so attractively that after a time one almost begins to wonder why so many dramatists prefer the dull and diffi- cult medium of prose. One result of this, and of the author's happy- go-lucky, take-it-or-leave-a attitude to his art and his audience, is that Happy As Larry, instead of seeming very novel and " modern," has a timeless, traditional atmosphere, linking us with the days when verse counted far more than verisimilitude and a playwright could resort to magic without having to drag in the Theory of Relativity.
This crazy, beautiful and curiously satisfying play, which well deserves a transfer to the West End, is finely acted by an Irish cast, among whom Miss Sheila Manahan and Mr. Liam Redmond have the best opportunities and make the very most of them. It is pre- ceded by A Pound on Demand, a sketch by Mr. Sean O'Casey ; although almost entirely pointless, this cannot be called a draw.
PETER FLEMING.
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