THE THEATRE.
"HASSAN," BY JAMES ELROY FLECKER, AT HIS MAJESTY'S.
THAT pawnbrokers and landladies should have an ineradicable distrust of poets is comprehensible. That theatrical pro- ducers should suffer so acutely from doubt of their capacity seems a gratuitous item in the curse which in this country pursues literary effort.
Mr. Basil Dean has, in many ways, produced Hassan very well, but never for a moment has he put his trust in Flecker. The play has a continuity of its own, thin but strong, like a thread of silk, but Mr. Basil Dean has been too timid to trust the weight of the play to it ; he has disregarded it and has tried to tie the episodes together with a new ligature of music. Ire seems to have severed Flecker's continuity quite incidentally, as if he had, indeed, never noticed it or considered the alternative of emphasising it. Hassan, the confectioner, is an excellent example of a type specially dear to English humour. He is Master Slender ; he is Charlie Chaplin ; he is Mr. Spodnoodle. Hassan is a fat, middle-aged tradesman ; he is a petit bourgeois, but he loves beauty in carpets, in gardens, in words, and in the pattern of life as he secs it in the bazaar. His friend, to whom he discovers his love for Yasmin, betrays him, and, half dead from the discovery of his and her perfidy, he is whirled—passive—into a strange adventure with the Caliph, Haroun al Raschid. The play is an exposition of the way in which poor Hassan, who has just learned the true character of Yasmin, the beautiful courtesan, is spared nothing by Fate, who piles up events to his complete disillusionment. His world falls to pieces before his eyes as he follows the heroic love-story of Rail and Pervaneh. Here, both romantic revenge and idyllic love are shown as base, foolish and mournful as well as splendid. Hassan becomes the friend of the Caliph and sees power and the love of princes stripped, like the love of women, of its glamour. The final symbolism of the play is that the two lovers who have chosen a night and a day of love and then death by torture (but not before the man has seen through the heroics of his choice), are, for a whim of the Caliph's, brought and killed in the little pavilion beside the silver fountain, which the Caliph had given to Hassan. Their blood stains the beautiful carpet which had delighted the confectioner above all his master's gifts. In the wreck nothing remains to Hassan but the friendship of Ishak, the poet, the Caliph's minstrel, who has become his friend. The Golden Journey to Samarkand, so familiar to admirers of Flecker's poetry, is the perfect emotional solution of the situation.
All through, the play glitters with humour, pomp and a perfection of phraseology which we have not seen on the stage since Shakespeare. Shelley's Cenci has notable lines in it, but it falls below Hassan in beauty. Here, with no straining after effects and with prose interspersed by occa- sional lyrics as its medium, we have one of the noblest plays of the English romantic tradition.
In such a play it is plain that the decor will be very important. Mr. George Harris has designed some beautiful dresses, particularly notable among which are the dresses worn by Ishak, the minstrel, by the posse of police, by Masrur, the black executioner, and by supers, both in the big ballet scene and in that where the Caliph holds his Divan.
He has also designed at least one beautiful scene. The Street of Felicity by the Fountain of the Two Pigeons as it is seen by moonlight is attractive, and the whole of the Divan scene has merit. But, for the most part, it is quite clear that Mr. Harris does not yet know what to do with his scenes and dresses when he has designed them, and that even with Persia as his theme he is afraid of colour. Most of his work is restless
and insufficiently simplified. Neither in the use of colour nor line does Mr. Harris regret sufficiently to get clean, positive effects. This is obviously a difficult thing to do ; the temptation to dab at their work is felt by all artists in whatever medium. Surely a little touching here or there will improve things ? Who has not had that belief ? But Mr. Harris must learn to make up his mind and then harden his heart. Among the actors, Mr. Ainley, Miss Cathleen Nesbitt, Miss Laura Cowie, Mr. Malcolm Keen and Mr. Leon Quartermaine stand out. But, with varying degrees of merit, because their parts are of varying degrees of difficulty, they never seem to do more than give an adequate representation. Mr. Leon Quartermaine is an actor for whom most of us have great admiration and respect, but he is not at his best as Ishak ; he somehow gives a thin and sharp effect, he has some of the best lines in the play, but he seems to speak them without enjoyment or richness. His appear- ance and bearing are, however, quite admirable, and where he has to be dramatic rather than lyrical, he is often excellent.
I don't know why Miss Cathleen Nesbitt is so often cast for wanton parts. She seems to me to have too much intel- lectual and too little sensual subtlety for them. However, she gave the impression that she was the one person who had understood the play.
I should not have thought that Miss Laura Cowie could have acted the part of Pervaneh at all, but she looked so beautiful, like a rain-drenched lily, that the audience forgave her the fact that they could not believe in her fanatical romanticism. I should have thought, by the way, that this part would suit Miss Nesbitt. Whether the courtesan part would have suited Miss Cowie, I don't know, but she played Pervaneh well enough to make us feel that we could not spare her from the cast.
I suppose the question, Would Flecker himself have liked it ? will cross the mind of every reader of his poetry who sees how Mr. Basil Dean believes Hassan came to make the Golden Journey to Samarkand. Probably, if we read the letters which Flecker wrote about his ideas for its production, we shall believe that he would have been satisfied with this version. I think that the theatre he dreamed of was the theatre of Sir Herbert Tree. He would have been satisfied with what we see and hear at His Majesty's because pro- ductions in what we in England instinctively class as the Granville-Barker manner were unknown to him.
TARN.
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