The Theatre [" THE Taurn GAME." BY H. E. S.
DAVIDSON. AT Trrs GLOBE THEATRE. " DIVERSION." BY JOHN VAN DRUTEN. AT THE LITTLE THEATRE. " THE MASTER BUILDER." BY HENRIK IBSEN. AT THE EVERYMAN THEATRE]
THE first of these plays was judged by dramatic critics, last week, in the friendly atmosphere of a professional matinee. No doubt misinterpreting the intentions of the management, we looked for something exceptional and daring. We found two themes of customary light comedy clumsily fitted into a single plot.
The first theme struck me as silly, and gave the impression of an attempt to " write in " two good parts for Miss Lily Elsie and Mr. Ivor Novello. It is the wildly impudent pursuit of a wealthy young woman by a momentarily penniless young man, who may, however, become rich if he marries, because the rich beauty's money will then legally revert to him. Audibly, visibly the play palls and interest flags, as these two chase and dodge one another. As visibly and audibly it glows and warms, as the subordinate theme emerges, which shows us a ten-per-cent. commission lady living off her friends, and another, Lady Joan Culver, whose tomboy manners and unattractive " style " have made her hitherto unmarriageable. This part is played, with delicious sense of humour, by Miss Viola Tree, whose every kiss is a collision, who supposes she must have taken about eight years to get not very far in the piece of embroidery she drags about with her at week-end parties, and who will most lovably " dress as a giraffe." It is a truthful, a perfect piece of acting. And Miss Braithwaite's as the ten-per-cent. hostess is one of her great successes. (She might perhaps discard the nervous laugh, for one cannot believe that this determined money- maker was ever nervous.) For the rest, Mr. Novell° does what he can to make the impudent lover lively, if not real. But Miss Lily Elsie can only make the rich heroine what she is—a very p-etty doll.
Young men in love seem to be a favourite study for Mr. John Van Druten. Are they interesting ? Mr. Van Druten certainly interested us in Young IVoodley. His new hero, Wyn Hayward in Diversion, is less " sympathetic." We have seen him so often before !—the respectable youth hopelessly entangled with a far from respectable woman (" actress," as usual). He pleads, he raves, he explains—or rather explains that he can't explain it. We see his eminent Harley Street father offering the vain help of words. We feel that forcible isolation in a nursing home, with perhaps a mild operation for appendicitis, would be the one remedy. But, like the father, we can do nothing except watch and find it incredible that a notorious " actress " should so enslave a young man who has already (he tells us) had his " affairs " and his experience of women. The " actress " in this instance (Miss Cathleen Nesbitt shows her very clearly) might well have gone on including Wyn amongst her favourites, if only in order to cool him off. For some reason or other she refuses and gets strangled by him in consequence. My sympathies were with her all the time. Wyn bored her as he did me, and that was a bond between us. He is played with immense hysterical energy by Mr. Maurice Evans, and in this play, I must add, Mr. Van Druten exhibits again his power in writing naturally effective dialogue.
We have seen very little of Ibsen's Master Builder since it was produced in England nearly forty years ago, though
the part of Solness might well have tempted leading actors.
At last the Everyman Theatre gives us a straightforward revival " dated " by costume in a period a little earlier than
that of the original production, but (wisely) with no attempt to adapt the play to English contemporary habit, and to turn Solness, say, into a stockbroker, with shares instead of towers toppling about him. So no doubt an Englishman might have imagined him. But Ibsen (one cannot assert too often) was poet as well as dramatist, and now, at the turn of his life, he seems to have felt a certain weariness of hygienic " homes for men and women "—of solid realism in play-writing—and to have dreamed of dangerous adventure amongst such heights as those of the eerie mountains where John Gabriel Borkman found only the chill that strikes upon the heart after all life's disappointments. So here, in The Master Builder, the adventure, the thrill, the last inspiration—delusive, almost delirious—comes to Solness in the half-forgotten figure of Hilda Wangel. She, too, is part of the younger generation he fears, as visible presence ; but also, symbolically she is his own youth rising to remind him that long ago he promised himself some final frantic ascent of vision. Do dreams come true ? Is there time ? Can he recover enough of early hope to defy the competitive real youth of his rivals in building ? It must be either that, or a continuance of dull remorse for the ruthlessness which has made his success ; and made, too, a dead woman of his still living wife. (" I seem to have come up out of the grave," says- Hilda, after her talk with Mrs. Solness.) The master builder may die like that, while alive, if he cannot build higher—build castles in the air. But he cannot. He falls. We know his end.
In this revival the memorable study of ambition and regret, of hope and failure, is shown, with the dreams of the poet diminished, and the prose of the home-builder accen- tuated, in an honest performance by Mr. Charles Carson. Miss Florence McHugh's Hilda is a surprise. She has a beautifully expressive face in silence—in watching and listening. She has poetry. Her voice is not yet so succes- sively under control. Is it Ibsen's fault that she is never able to make us feel that Hilda's story is real—though the " frightfully thrilling " visitant's human insight is revealed in the scenes with Mrs. Solness and in that where she forces the ageing man to be more merciful to the younger genera- tion ? A certain lurking disappointment that remains; after seeing the play again, comes perhaps from an uneasy sense that Hilda is only an inner voice, speaking to Solness out of the past, like the dim hero of Ellida's imagination in The Lady from the Sea ; a ghost that daylight in an archi- teet's workroom would have exorcized. It is on this account that -the play moves one a little less in representation than in
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