THE THEATRE,
REVOLVER SHOTS
[" KATERINA," BY ANDREYEV. BARNES THEATRE.] As SOOD as the curtain goes up on the first act, we hear voices; a man's, a woman's raised in a quarrel "off." "You're lying I" sounds the man's voice ; while the woman protests. Presently, she runs across the half-darkened stage, he after her—firing revolver shots, and repeatedly missing. She disappears. He collapses hysterically.
This is disturbing ; but, so far, not very moving or interest- ing, because we as yet know nothing about this woman and this man. During the remainder of the act we learn that they are husband and wife ; that he supposes her to be unfaith- ful; and that he appears to be gloomily sentimental, with accesses of jealous energy that end in the reaction of inertia. About her, about Katerina, we "wait for information" of which we get a little, but not much, in Act Two.
With Miss Frances Carson to represent her, she is very pretty, in the white dress that she wore, one morning, some months later, because she felt happier at last. Another sentimentalist, evidently ! She is beginning to regret the revolver-shooting husband whose letters she hasn't answered. Is she guilty ? (The vocabulary of melodrama imposes itself as one recounts the outline of what is still hardly more than an extract from the crimes column, or the recital of a fait divers.) No, Katerina was not guilty, but a woman of the type of Dumas' Francillon : proud, resentful, requiring to be held above suspicion. For now, in revenge, she has resigned herself to a foppish fellow who bursts into tears when she shows him her contempt. The " affair " has been brief, yet fatal. She confesses, when her husband returns to her. He will take her back. But it is too late. Something has happened, something has given way.
Those revolver shots ! They symbolized so much for her, apparently, that they degraded her for ever. They cost him such an effort that he can never do anything domestically again—can only make speeches in Parliament and feel tired afterwards and gaze dully ahead as he is confronted with progressive proofs of his wife's degradation. When his friends warn him about her, he gazes blankly in front of him. r One of them, the artist Paul Koromislov, urges him to "shoot her down," which shows what a cad Paul was, since he too has been Katerina's lover. The stricken husband mutters some- thing. By now he is beyond-the shooting stage. A man has but one shot in life, we are required to believe. (This man, as a matter of strict fact, had three.) And a woman can only be missed once—or at one attempt. After that, Destiny is fixed for each of them.
Obviously the grave defect of Andreyev's play is this sum- mary psychology, involved by the bullet and revolver theory. His two people have none of the richness of life, conferred by Tchehov upon the smallest of his characters. They are themes for the neurologist—two " mses " exhibiting the after-effects of sudden shock. With an effort one can believe in Katerina's descent from white-dressed wife, dreaming in the fine daylight, to inebriate Salome dancing divested for tipsy men in a studio. But belief would be easier had Andreyev (as Ibsen surely would have done) thrown retrospective light upon her antecedents during the course of four acts. One could believe better, too, were the descent passive, whereas it appears to be deliberate, arch, provocative ; as in the studio scene with Paul. In this scene—in one or two others—Katerina makes us suspect her again. We begin to be afraid that those revolver shots were not a complete explanation of her premier pas. One would like to know more about her married life before that quarrel in the next room. Not all Miss Frances Carson's efforts could make Katerina Seem normally intelligible. But in the second act she gave us the complete woman—variable, hesitating, torn by doubt. The husband was Mr. John Gielgud. His is rather a curious case. His tendency is to overact quietly. I mean that, like Mr. Ernest Milton, who is Paul, he seems unable to make light transitions, or to bring a little implicit humour to bear upon a part. Just as Mr. Milton, who has brilliant moments in the studio, cannot say such a simple thing as "Hadn't you better take a rug ? " without appearing to mean "You are going to die of pneumonia," so Mr. Gielgud's smallest utterance sounds .like an announcement of doom. However, this part, in its dull passivity, suits his present method—his wan stare, his quivering mouth. But one must hope for him that Russian plays will not claim him too long. They minister to his mannerisms, and that is perhaps the worst service any play can
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