The Theatre
" Dinner at Eight." By George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber. At the Palace Theatre HENGIST and Rim are, of all invaders of islands, the most unforgettable and the most elusive. Every schoolboy knows,
no adult can forget, that they landed on our shores. But why they came, or who they were, or what they did after disembarking, no one is prepared to say ; " their coming," we should write, if cornered and catechized by some night- mare development of adult education, " had widespread repercussions." As it was with Hengist and Horsa in Britain, so it was with Lord and Lady Ferncliffe in Manhattan.
They came. If they had not come, Mrs. Jordan would not have arranged, with fluttering but efficient alacrity, that dinner at which they were to be the guests of honour ; and we should never have been invited to meet those other guests, those guests of less honour. The Packards—he a bull on Wall Street with good cause to outroar the horned herd ; she tart and tough and only technically frail, a platinum head with a heart of dross. Dr. Talbot, the sterling in him turned to base metal by that platinum ; his wife, seeing through and beyond his intrigue and so forgiving him. Carlotta Vance, an actress defying superannuation with
gamine, unreflecting gaiety, lifting her epigrams to the level
of her face. Larry Renault, a film star dethroned, blinding himself with drink to the necessity for abdication. Paula, our hostess's daughter, tragically worshipping at his feet of clay. Her father, a mild, distinguished martyr, doomed to ruin (in Act I) and to death (in Act II).
But for the Ferneliffes, we should have met none of these. Nor should we have been privileged to witness the flare of passions in Mrs. Jordan's servants' ball, where knives come out, and also bigamy, and the lobster in aspic meets an ugly fate. But for the Ferncliffes, we should have missed a great deal.
In the end we miss the Ferncliffes themselves. Like Hengist and Horsa, they vanish in a cloud of repercussions.
All peers on the stage are keen on one of two things : fishing or gardening. We know that there are no gardens in America : it is the tarpon at Miami who rustle Mrs. Jordan's lions. The Ferneliffes, suddenly southward bound, leave a secretary to telephone their apologies.
In New York (where this play is an established success) their eleventh-hour dereliction must disappoint on both sides of the footlights. In London it does not ; we cannot alto- gether share their hostess's chagrin. For the appearance of the Ferncliffes would have brought home to us unescapably the cardinal fault of this performance : that it is an American play acted in English. The fault, its only one, is serious. Mr. Kaufman's production is of a meticulous realism (how deftly that two-piece telephone in Mr. Jordan's office reminds us that his business is behind the times 0. All the illusions are artfully sustained save one : that the characters are the Americans they profess to be.
If they were not so essentially American it would not matter. When Mr. Basil Sydney offers to assume an English accent if that will restore the film-star's fortunes, we can at a pinch overlook the fact that he has never spoken with anything else, as we can overlook the references of a beige-coloured Othello to his sooty bosom. But it is by pervading rather than by obtruding that this incongruity weakens the play.
The cross-breeding of American idiom and humour with an English utterance robs much excellent comedy of its full effect ; we have throughout the feeling that we are in the presence of a hybrid. That is why, when the Ferncliffes fail their hostess, we are not sorry : for the introduction of two characters who really are supposed to be English among a number of others who have never pretended to be American would have brought about a disastrous misalliance of the conventions involved.
Apart from this fundamental but quite unavoidable defect, Dinner at Eight is brilliant and generous entertainment. Its writing is swift, witty, economical, and always dramatically effective ; the themes for half a dozen plays are knit together with an address which—if it leaves us, of necessity, feeling that the development of each is incomplete--is technically admirable. Most of the acting is very good. Mr. Basil Sydney trails the flamboyant tatters of.the film-star down the road to despair and suicide in .a fine performance though I cannot think that even bootleg whisky can lame a man before our eyes). Mr. Dave Burns brilliantly portrays his agent, striving with pathetic loyalty to break his fall into humiliation. Miss Irene Vanbrugh steers the social aspirations of the hostess to an extravagant &Mae with complete success. Mr. Lyn Harding is all that we have been taught to expect of Big Business from the Middle West (which is saying a good deal) and Miss Carol Goodner dazzlingly projects the hard, strident glamour of his wife. Miss Laura Cowie's actress is as amusing as the authors can have hoped, and as real as they have allowed her to be. There were others whom I have no space to praise, and others again whom, after so pleasant an evening, it would be churlish to blame. Dinner at Eight will satisfy both glut-
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