28 MAY 1932, Page 12

The Theatre

"Dangerous Corner." By J. B. Priestley. At the Lyric

You five tcs after the curtain rises the dialogue is casual, dexterous, and trivial, creating just that sort of vacuum which drama abhors and which the experienced playgoer has learnt to regard as ominous. A dead man is under discussion : a friend, if not a relation, of six of the seven people on the stage. We are made aware, more through their retieences than through their words, of a dark image lying in the minds of all of them. But Fate, less solicitous than the Automobile Association, forewarns neither us nor them of the Dangerous Corner in their affairs. One of them follows, blindly and too fast, a turn in the conversation : recognizes a possession of the dead man's which she could never, on the known evidence, have seen : and thus twitches loose the decent, necessary shroud which had veiled the naked and suppurating truth.

The exhumation goes fiercely forward. To extract conics• sions, and yet further confessions, from each other becomes an obsession imposed as a duty on the group by motives ranging widely from loyalty to revenge. With each avowal the dead man is less of a mystery, more of a monster ; and with earn avowal the living themselves expose fresh depths of iniquity and pain behind their own masks of agreeable normality.

They tear the bandages off each other's wounds and throw down in the sight of all the secret weapons that inflicted them. In their relations with the dead man all are convicted in some degree of guilt ; and if any had of him some memory which they hold dear, the truth turns it into a reproach and a mockery.

Technically, the play is an amazing piece of virtuosity. Like an avalanche started by a bounding and irresponsible pebble, confession. crashes resistlessly down on the bland pastures of normality ; it gathers momentum, as it spreads desolation, in the most natural way in the world. The impact of each separate revelation gives rise inevitably to the next, as one falling boulder dislodges another. The ties and conflicts of these characters are of a complexity—both emo- tional and circumstantial—far greater than is usual : yet the fabric of their relationships is made plausibly compact with the minimum of explanation and delay.

The play, however, has two main faults, and its very adroitness is the cause of one of them. The modern audience is quick of apprehension ; what may be termed the tempo of its perceptions has developed, since the days of the soliloquy and the aside, a very creditable turn of speed. But in this play Mr. Priestley hustles us along too fast. By developing internal drama along certain particular lines at too high a pressure he has produced something of the same effect as if he had crowded his scene with external action of extreme and recurrent violence. The occasionally misplaced laughter of the audience announced that Mr. Priestley was hitting them, not too hard, not in the wrong way, but simply too often. The impacts, not the implications, of an unremitting succession of " strong " situations produced a reflex action, which found relief in silly laughter. Truth played havoc in that charmed but far from charming circle on the stage, spinning like a witchdoctor in their midst and smelling out his victims with fearful justice. But there were times when his antics -and his divinations appeared too balefully con- tinous, and we felt that we were having, literally, too much of a good thing. .

The play's other fault is remembered rather than observed. It, too, is the practical drawback to a theoretical virtue. The play's unity of purpose—its relentless drive in a single direction—invests the characters with a kind of restricted, specialized reality. They are in the confessional all the time, and all the time under the goad of some powerful and torment- ing emotion. They are presented to us, unnaturally static, in the huddled, agonized attitudes of prisone'rs in a Little Ease. At the end of the play a daring and ingenious trick switches the action back to the point from which we started. Once more, but this time consciously, we approach that Dangerous Corner in the conversation : and it is rounded safely. The fatal slip is made, but—partly by luck, partly by design—it is overlooked. The irreproachable pattern of triviality is not broken ; and all the consequences we have seen are suspended to the sound of dance music.

But in this interlude of repetition we have re-encountered Miss Mockridge, the novelist : a minor character who saw the original pebble dislodged but left the scene before the avalanche began to move. She is the most tritely and super- tidally observed of the characters ; her part is in conception almost irrelevant, in execution rather " literary." Yet when we meet her for the second time she seems to have acquired a new interest, a new vitality, simply because, in contrast to the others, she can lay claim to an existence not conditioned by the close and terrible atmosphere of the Third Degree. Seeing her, we realize how very special has been the case so skilfully presented on the stage.

The acting is, with one exception, notably good, Miss Flora Robson, Mr. Richard Bird, Mr. Frank Allenby, and Mr. 1Villiam Fox particularly distinguishing themselves. Though mainly surswssful, Mr. Turonc Guthrie's production at times produces, by its almost aggressive naturalism, the effect of that artifice which it so strenuously shuns. Like the tempo of Mr. Priestley's drama, it too is a little ahead of its time.

PETER FLEMING.