CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THEATRE
"The Clandestine Marriage." By George Colman and David Garrick. (Old Vic.) Tins plain, brisk and noisily actable Garrick-Colman comedy is at bottom a comment on arrivisme. The penniless Lovewell has secretly married the moneyed Fanny, whose father, a City merchant, wants to buy her a title in exchange for a dowry. By an intricate misunderstanding Lord Ogleby, a senescent rake, is led to believe that he is Fanny's beloved: finally, after headlong nocturnal to-and- froing, love triumphs over the social profit motive. The odd thing about the Old Vic production is, in a word, Mr. Donald Wolfit ; not so much his presence in it, as his position. Mr. Wolfit, an actor of the boldly self-made sort, whose skill in playing upstarts is unrivalled in our time, is cast as Lord Ogleby, the senior aristocrat of the whole entertainment. Well, Georges Dandin wanted it ; so, it seems, does the Old Vic ; and Mr. Wolfit is thus faced with a task akin to that of a craftsman who should be called upon to carve a Sheraton escritoire out of Sherwood oak.
The other performances are, in the main, cast strictly to type, and Mr. Wolfit's obtrudes like a pantomime dame in the chorus of a musical comedy. The authors envisaged Ogleby as a flimsy and dew-lapped ruin of a man ; Wolfit is as staunch and foursquare as an Olympic wrestler, and what he achieves is a tremendous display of sheer toil, a triumph of art over nature, in which the actor tests all the resources of his paintbox, and coaxes his lordly voice to assume slippery and importunate eld by simulating the whine of a rusty gate-hinge. Possessing not one of the qualities, physical or temperamental, of the part (which have been all but patented by Messrs. Ernest Milton and Ernest Thesiger), he attacks it with the knockdown aplomb which Grimaldi, one imagines, might have brought to Coriolanus. Mr. Wolfit is an actor with a comedian's face and a tragedian's soul, and for this reason nearly always looks mysteriously miscast." He bears his present burden superbly, and rarely groans under it ; but the result is a Dickensian pantaloon, not a Garrickian fop.
The company offer probably their best all-round display of the season. Miss Charmian Eyre lends resilience and grace to the part of Fanny, and will be quite splendid when she discovers how to project a sharper personality. Mr. Ernest Hare cunningly softens her father's formidable greed with an admixture of the late Sid Field's aggrieved perplexity, and in lesser parts Messrs. Andr6 Morell and John Phillips are. particularly good. I liked best the stolid and rapaciously tipsy valet of Mr. Leo McKern: his drunk scene in the last act is far and away the funniest and completest spot of the evening. Mr. Hilton Edwards' production moves as racily as if on roller-skates, apart from a few excursions into the kind of flunkeys- with-tapers-to-music business with which Nigel Playfair delighted so many hearts at Hammersmith a quarter of a century ago.
KENNETH TYNAN.
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