STAGE AND SCREEN The Theatre
"Biography:" By S. N. Behrman. At the Globe Theatre.
Tim title of this play should be Autobiography. It was her own life that Marion Froude was asked by Richard Kurt to write, and when you write your own life it is called an Auto- biography. The distinction may seem a pedantic one, but it is time that somebody drew it, or we shall find ourselves being lured to a play called Murder and fobbed off with a suicide; Marion Froude was, on her own admission, a second-rate artist: Baiter charm and her enterprise had enabled her to specialize in portraits of the contemporary great. The public saw her forty years of roving life as one long jaunt among the giants, and, since she flew the rakish colours of Bohemia, romance and Scandal were not expected to be absent. Richard Kurt—an editor, like so many Americans, at 25—felt that this transit of Venus should be serialized in his magazine. The terms were attractive, and the artist, not less amused than amazed, turned autobiographer.
But such alas ! is human nature that we can hardly hope to tell the truth about ourselves without upsetting someone else. Vested interests bar Marion's progress to the public confessional. They are embodied in Leander Nolan, a mixture of pomposity and pathos, who loved her years ago in Ten- nessee in circumstances which, if made public, would spoil his senatorial prospects in that strait-laced state. He has a power- ful ally in his future father-in-law, whose writ runs far enough in the newspaper world to lose Kurt his editorship.
But the snake is scotched, not killed. The revelations will be just as damning in book form, and Kurt determines that they shall be made. He is a fanatic, for whom the forces here opposed to him typify the injustice and corruption of modem life, of which his bitter and half-reasoned hatred is due partly to an early tragedy but more to his inherent cussedness. He feels that he is fighting a holy war.
In the end he loses it, for Marion destroys her memoirs. They are lovers now, but there can be no happiness for them together. The dervish and the dilettante are incompatible ; they stand for opposite ways of life. They both—she in her wisdom, he on an impulse—accept the necessity to kiss and part.
The intrigue alone would make this a highly effective comedy ; the study of Kurt's relations with Marion gives it real distinction. Both parts are played to perfection. Miss Ina Claire's performance has every technical excellence—a sure and subtle sense of comedy, a tenderness which never lapses into 'sentimentality, and an edge of satire. But her great achievement is to suggest in Marion those unusual powers of appreciation, that complete and joyful surrender to life, which are the source of her charm and her strength. We feel that this lady could never have regrets ; and that is the key to Marion's character and, indeed, to the atmosphere of the whole comedy.
Mr. Laurence Olivier is not less good. Kurt is intolerant, and only the actor saves him from being intolerable. The demons that possess him give him no peace ; he is always in a hurry, and almost always in a fury. Even his love for Marion can soften him only momentarily. All this Mr. Olivier conveys with a brilliant precision.
Leander, who is a foul hypocrite and as crooked as he is conceited, yet remains somehow lovable, and Mr. Frank Cellier _plays him as well as any English actor could. But two other characters—the newspaper magnate and his daughter— are irredeemably transatlantic. Both the types they represent and the language they speak have lost much of their comedic content in transit from America, though Mr. Sam Livesey and Miss Joan Wyndham play them well.
• Mr. Noel Coward's production and Mrs. C,althrop's setting are alike admirable. Mr. Behrman's dialogue has style, a rare quality in the modern theatre,; it lapses only occasionally, and never more than a sentence at a time, into the literary. At the beginning of the play there is one character so irrelevant that I take him to have been in some way symbolic.
. PETER FLEMING.
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