THE THEATRE
SHERIDAN AND WILKINSON
THE Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, has a devoted public of its own : a public bewitched by memories of The Beggar's Opera. When, instead of opera, they get comedy, and R. B. Sheridan Esquire (as the programme will have it) instead of Mr. Gay, you feel that they are always expecting the actors to relapse into the ravishing melodies that were " encored," for a blissful year and more, in this very house.
Indeed, one misses the music in this new version of The Rivals. It is staged so as to make one anticipate an inter- mittent tinkling of harpsichords. Mr. Nigel Playfair has done what he could. He has (for example) arranged Mrs. Mala- prop's celebrated recital of the requisites for female education as though she were on the verge of recitative. She pauses, she prepares herself, she takes the centre of the stage—Sir Anthony Absolute, with his lorgnette, ready to applaud her trills. Faulkland's soliloquy in Act iii ought, one feels, to be a solo. But he only hums a bar or two. One shrill soprano note is achieved by Lucy, the little doll-like maid, with her wooden gestures, at the end of Act I. Alas, the curtain comes down ! One has a sense of delusion. The gallery is disappointed.
In fact, with the help of Mr. Norman Wilkinson's dainty decorations, Mr. Playfair has determined that, this time, The Rivals shall be an " artificial comedy " (in Charles Lamb's sense) if ever there was one.
Oddly enough, though he has " produced " thus fantas- tically, his own is one of the few relatively natural performances in the play : he makes a credible, if not very rustic Bob Acres, and one can laugh loud (without the fear of breaking Dresden China) at the admirable scene between Bob and his shivering, sympathetic valet, David, on whom Mr. Miles Malleson confers genuine vitality, without any modish affecta- tion. The others are elegant and exquisite—all fluttering arms and delicately poised fingers, gallant gestures, tilted chins : the oppressively overdressed Lydia ; her foil, the tearful Julia ; a rather more probable Sir Anthony ; a voci- ferating Faulkland---:-/vhat a bore Faulkland is in this play I —and, above all, a completely embellished Mrs. Malaprop deprived of every vestige of humour, in her new disguise as a well-looking great lady who never could have muddled her parts of speech, or have been described, by any gallant of the period, as " an old weather-beaten she-dragon."
For this character, one may boldly prefer the traditional grotesque, though she might have contrasted too crudely with backgrounds that turn Bath into a Kate Greenaway Paradise. What must the gallery at the Lyric, Hammersmith, think of the eighteenth century, by the way ! Ali, what a pays de Te»dre must our plain England have been in those days, and what a monstrously " obleeging " and " tay-drink- ing " orgy was the life the Quality led here
R. J.
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