"Red Night.' By J. L. Hodson. At the Queen's Mn.
Honsow has written a sincere but diffuse play about the War. Private Hardcastle, its central figure, is a sensitive and educated man, whom we see bludgeoned by horror and futility until death takes him at the very moment when a commission has offered a temporary reprieve. In everything, and not least in its choice of a hero, the play suffers from having been born as a novel. In a novel you do not have to rely on words and actions alone ; you can examine the thoughts and, emotions that lie behind them, and for this reason a man like Hardcastle, who thinks and feels if not more deeply at least more coherently than most of his com- panions, is a good protagonist for a book about the War. But in a play about the War he loses his technical advantages over the common herd ; though his tragedy may be greater than theirs, it does not seem so, and when he rails at fate his protests lack the poignancy that they would have if they came from a person of little understanding. His trite philosophy would have been effective on less educated lips, and a victim of the folly of mankind who could not have been expected to know that men are fools would have been more pathetic than one who might at least have suspected it.
The humour and the realism of the play are admirable ; only in its more serious passages is the dialogue over-literary. Mr. Robert Donat plays Hardcastle self-effacingly and well. Mr. John Mills gives a brilliant performance as a Cockney ; not the least merit of his acting is his firm control of a part which, over-exuberantly played, would have upset the
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