THE THEATRE.
" THE MAN IN DRESS CLOTHES " AT THE GARRICK THEATRE.
The Man in Dress Clothes is something of a theatrical curiosity. When its run began it was apparently doomed to failure— nobody went ; the theatre was empty ; and, if my memory serves me, " last weeks " were already announced when the dramatic critic of the Daily Mail or the Evening News—I forget which—decided to write it up. This he did. In both the papers appeared article after article : This was the most wonderful play that had ever been seen ; it was humorous ; it was pathetic ; it was an " intellectual treat " ; the acting was superb ; the ladies lovely ; the music entrancing ; the sentiment moving ; and so forth ! Business began to improve. This was six weeks' or so ago, and the play is still running.
Now, it has been said that dramatic criticism has very little influence upon the commercial success of a play one way or the other. Here, then, was an instance to the contrary. Full, therefore, of curiosity as to this first play saved from an early grave by one of my colleagues, I went to the Garrick. For though I did not gather from previous criticisms that the play provided quite the " intellectual treat " promised, yet one imagined that a perfectly damp squib could not be blown into radiance by however lusty a puffer. I found it a wonderful production, with an inexhaustible spring of the most plummy - sentiment, and with an element of knockabout bustle and elderly jokes reminiscent of the pantomime.
Mr. Seymour Hicks, as what apparently in those circles is considered a romantic good fellow, whom most of us would probably class as a waster possessed of an engaging degree of bounce, acted excellently, and Miss Barbara Hoffe's dark beauty was well displayed.
The plot is this. The Comte d'Artois loves his Comtesse to distraction, but has had misunderstandings with her and is separated from her. She believes him a rich eccentric with a taste for moving house at inconvenient moments. He is really being sold up by bailiffs, and the play takes its name from the fact that in his bankruptcy he is only allowed to keep one suit. He chooses dress clothes, and is consequently debarred from going out before the evening. The action of the play is con- cerned with the reconciliation of husband and wife, and it has a fairy tale ending in which his distrained furniture and his estranged wife are brought back to him in a dazzle of the electric light that had but now been turned off by the company.
Mr. Hicks and Miss Hoffe and the authors got into teniblo tangles with their grammar sometimes, and as Miss Hoffe's delivery is of the prolonged, deliberate and slow kind which rings the last ounce of " sob-stuff " out of the most casual request for the mustard, some of the situations were rather funny. There was a dreadful moment over a piece of dialogue which began something like this :—
" . . . that . . . you, . . . Germaine ? ' Yes, . . . it . . . is . . . I, . . . Henri 1 " when grammatical shipwreck seemed inevitable. What does the Pure English Association say about this " I " by the way ? I believe it has now given its blessing to " It's me ! " as an undoubted idiom.
What else was there in the play ? Oh, yes ! We had the " any port in a storm " and the " How did he strike you ? He didn't strike me ! " jokes—both of them received with enthusiasm. Yet there was something to " write up " after all. The Man in Dress Clothes has three popular qualities in it, and all in the superlative degree—bustle, bounce, sob-stuff- and differs thus from the languid products of incompetence that empty so many of our theatres. TARN.
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