Licensed to Kill
Arsenic and Old Lace. (Vaudeville.) APERFORMAN( ti by Duse was apt to be a most devastating criticism of the play,' wrote Desniond MacCarth■ in 1924. The commercial theatre is a devil for punishment: and to this day will persist in inviting its subtlest and most truthful Actors to appear in shallow or equivocal vehicles which they promptly capsize. Which is what has happened to Joseph Kesselring's neat little comedy about three homicidal lunatics. Athene Seyler. S■bil Thorndike and Neil Mc- Carthy set themselves relentlessly to lay bare the essential dishonesty of the piece — with such efficiency that one almost feels like protesting, on Mr. Kesselring's behalf. that after all he probably only meant to raise a modest laugh.
Arsenic and Old Lace is, or should have been, the simplest sort of trouble-free wish-fulfilment. Two benevolent old ladies have for years been murdering old gentlemen—as presumably many old ladies would like to do if it could be managed with such magical ease--and cocking a snook at the doting local police. Meanwhile nephew Jonathan roams the globe torturing and killing, like his aunts, at random. As a child Jonathan tied baby Mortimer to the bedpost and stuck needles up his fingernails. Brother Mortimer is the sane member of the family. When he stumbles on a corpse in the windowseat. Mortimer resolves to pin the guilt on brother Teddy. Teddy is the harmless lunatic and family gravedigger, obliged by his aunts to spend much of his time with a spade in the cellar, keeping pace with their insatiable thirst for blood.
All good clean fun, you will doubtless be thinking, a little fanciful perhaps--but not, I swear, in the hands of Sybil Thorndike and Athene Seyler. If there is something phoney about Aunt Abby's saintly smile, something unpleasantly cloying, it is confirmed by the arrival of Aunt Martha, back from a spot of sick-bed visiting. These two are vampires. Both visibly draw strength and sustenance from the presen- ce of dead flesh, still warm under the witidowseat. If Sybil Thorndike is glowing with health and spirits from her latest crime, Athene Seyler positively wobbles with glee: and jigs up and down in frustrated greed when a ring at the door prevents her from taking a peek at the body. There is no escaping the lust in their scrambling haste when a fresh victim appears on the porch, in their dreadful petulance when headed away from the cellar door. Cut off from the life-source, both sets of features sag, baleful, lifeless, male- volent, invaded by a deathly apathy. This is no joke, and, in face of two such powerful perform- ances, there is no use pretending it is.
We get little help elsewhere. Jonathan, who strangles with his bare hands and has had his face changed by plastic surgery into Boris Karloff's, embodies the last word in nastiness; and is evidently supposed to draw off the spec- tators' leaving the old ladies, as it were, .pcensed to kill without raising awkward ques- tions. But Neil McCarthy has also gone too far, taken Mr. Kesselring seriously, and turned in a detailed and wholly convincing study of criminal insanity. His eyes glare from grimy reddened sockets, his facial muscles barely move, his meaty hands hang limp at his sides, betraying the occasional, ominous twitch. By contrast. Des- mond Walter-Ellis, playing Teddy correctly as a Arcical madman, only pinpoints the play's uneasy mixture of styles. When Julia Lockwood. as the
nice girl alone in the dark with a total stranger, switches on the light and sees Jonathan, she ought by rights to have the screaming heeby-jeebies. Instead, she gives a slight, well-bred start, as of one expecting tea and finding coffee.
The moral is, of course, that Mr. Kesselring cannot have his cake and eat it; alternatively, if you want the kicks without the pricks, you should not wallow so wholeheartedly in the kicks. It is not enough to thank God for Richard Briers— a great comfort throughout as Mortimer—or to advertise that 'this theatre is disinfected through- out with Jeyes Fluid.' What is needed, when deal- ing with such unnerving portrayals of madness and murder, is a mental and emotional disin- fectant, something possibly along the lines Aristotle recommended all those years ago, under the name catharsis.
11 ILA RY SPURLING
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