BEYOND THE HORIZON, and GOLD: Two Plays. By Eugene O'Neill.
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In these two plays Mr. O'Neill's genius seems to be mainly theatrical, with little relationship to significant drama. With a marvellous eye for a stage crisis he conceives his plays in terms of a series of crises, but he is quite unscrupulous in his choice of a road to their attainment ; he takes the short cut, arm in arm with some fine " fat parts," and the primrose path in playwriting, as in other aesthetic activities, leads we know where. In Gold you have to swallow a sea-captain who thinks that a bangle he has found on a Pacific Island is of gold, encrusted with precious gems, although it is obvious to others that it is only twopenny trash. And then you have to believe that his ship sails from home without him while he is staying . for a couple of minutes to bid his wife good-bye. Neither of these incidents is of minor importance ; they are the very core of the plot, in each case leading up to tremendous sensa- tions that would justify, from a producer's point of view, this method of achieving them. But in cold print one per- ceives a skeletOn that only an Elizabethan with the thunder and lightning of verse could endow with a semblance of flesh and blood. Beyond the Horizon is a study of two alien tem- peraments bound together in adverse circumstances ; Robert Mayo, a poetically-inclined fellow condemned to manage a hateful farm ; and his wife Ruth, who desires romance and success. Sympathetic acting might inform these two poor creatures with some touch of tragedy, but here they are just dull, ineffective people. The first act gives the circumstance of their marriage. The second at (three years later) shows them unsuccessful and embittered. In the last act (seven years later still) they have sunk to hopelessness. And that is ,all. You do not watch them disintegrating under the play of forces beyond their control ; you are only told that thus rt is, so you have to accept it, and this absence of dynamic develOpment is not compensated for by any originality of• character or distinction- of mind.
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