The Theatre
[' A MURDER HAS BEEN ARRANGED." BY EMLYN WILLIAMS. AT THE ST. JAMES'S THEATRE.]
Is there any limit to the credulity expected of audiences at a
thriller " Y Apparently not. We are in this matter as were our ancestors who crowded to Elizabethan blood-tragedies. So long as they got a generous supply of murders, mutilations, rapes and suicides, with a few spectres thrown in, they swal- lowed all improbabilities. They never asked for a motive. Purveyors of stage massacres know better than to delay over pretexts. On with the carnage ! In romantic tragedy the world was divided into slayers and slain. The killers killed because it was their job and nature so to do. The killed just got in the way, moaning about owls and ravens. No nonsense about character-drawing. . . .
Quite in the Elizabethan manner—adapted to modern taste—Mr. Emlyn Williams scorns plausibility. He has told a ghost-story and a murder-story combined ; or rather not combined, not well associated ; but with parts (murder and ghosts) straggling apart ; until, in his last act, they mingle for a few magnificent moments. The model is Macbeth. But Shakespeare was better at amalgamation.
It is a bit of a mystery—to begin with—why Sir Charles Jasper, heir to two millions, if he is alive at eleven o'clock on his fortieth birthday, should select that evening to give a fancy dress party on the stage of the St. James's Theatre. One would have thought that he could have waited a night-or two, especially at a time like the present when millions appear and disappear like rockets in a night sky. Being silly enough to search for a motive and meaning in Sir Charles' behaviour, I found it in his taste for the occult. The St. James's Theatre —or any other theatre fitted for the production of Mr. Wil- liams's play—is, it seems, badly haunted. There are two resident ghosts—one, that of a man murdered in the theatre before the play begins, the other, reputedly, that of a dumb woman whose job it is (I think) to wander around after the murdered man and the murderer. So that was what brought Sir Charles to the St. James's. Two ghosts. And soon there were three. Because Sir Charles, defying omens and even the most elementary prudence, hospitably welcomes his only surviving relative, rival claimant (until 11 p.m.) to the two millions. This gentleman turns out to be an alleged journalist and serial writer, young, well dressed, with a bright philosophy Of crime which he expounds in a brilliant speech to Sir Charles's secretary, whom he has once loved and therefore oughtn't to trust. However, this wasn't the blunder it appeared to be ; because the secretary, hearing that the young gentlen n proposes promptly to murder Sir Charles, does nothing about it but dither, in a haunted manner, for the rest of the evening.
The murderer then gets to work—not in an original fashion. For his one bright idea is borrowed from that masterpiece of detective fiction, Mr. Oliver Onions's,In Accordance With the Evidence. He prompts Sir Charles to take down, under dictation, some lines suggesting suicide. Then lie imps a tablet into Sir Charles's whisky._ Sir Charles expires and is placed in a chair behind cutains, holding his supposed confession. And then the young man runs away Y Not at all. He laughs sardonically and goes upstairs to array himself in a fancy dress, presumably supplied to him by the St. James's management, because he can't have brought it with him.
So much for the murder story and for the lered who really does make one echo the old jest about knowing what God thought of money through seeing the people lie gives it to. Two millions for an ass like Sir Charles, whom we only don't despise as a cranky loon because he is so sweetly and reasonably acted by Mr. J. H. Roberts in his best Galsworthy manner !
Now for the ghosts. You had forgotten those ghosts ? So had I, until a very beautiful lady, with sober gestures, glided suddenly in—almost thrilling us, because the face and hands and delicate movements were those of that other-worldly actress, Miss Veronica Turleigh. This, then, must be the lady who haunted the murderer who murdered the man who was murdered before Sir Charles was (justly) murdered by the young man now dressing upstairs.
But I gather that she wasn't ! She was only a daft lady who, like so many other people, wandered, that evening, on the stage of the St. James's. However, she did set real ghosts going at last ; for Sir Charles, more sensible after death than in life, now rises—young murderer still dressing upstairs -- and sits, like Banquo, at the supper table.
This is effective. I liked it. I also liked the young man's arrival, his sight of what he supposes to be the real Sir Charles, not dead but hurt. and his discovery that Sir Charles -is dead, and that this is his ghost. I also liked Mr. Henry Kendall's outburst of terror at the end and his complete collapse before the supernatural. A good performance.
I cannot say the same of the lady who played Sir Charles's wife, for she seemed to me to have the unlucky faculty of getting on one's nerves the whole time ; and shaking lists, well clenched, seemed to be her sole method of indicating wild emotion. Miss Codrington gave a slick up-to-date sketch of the sort of secretary Sir Charles deserved to have ; his mother was amusingly shown by Miss Viola Compton ; and Mr. Whitmore Humphreys gave a steady, natural performance as an unexpected young man who was amongst those who strayed into the St. James's Theatre. His object, one guesses, was to rescue Sir Charles's wife from the consequences of Sir Charles's imbecility. It was odd, but the only people at that party—apart from Sir Charles's family—were gate-crashers.
This analysis may reveal my impression that Mr. 1Villianis's play is too much for my powers of suspending belief. It has been overpraised. But, also, it has a sort of splash-and-dash vigour and devil-may-care energy which renew one's hopes of the author's future. He is evidently bold enough, as we saw when he gave us Glamour at the Embassy Theatre. What lie needs is control and a greater respect for the relative sort of truth that carries a dramatist's collaborators, who are his
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