THE DEVIL'S DISCIPLE. By Bernard Shaw. (Winter Garden.) MELODRAMA must
be taken seriously; the suspicion of burlesque kills it stone dead. The producer of The Devil's Disciple realises this; but he apparently does not realise that it must be high seriousness, the Dickensian serious- ness of a Chadband, a Gradgrind, or a Pecksniff : a self-absorption so absolute that it should move us—in this case, to laughter. The production only achieves a desperate, plodding solemnity. It does something I would not have believed possible: it makes Shaw's most consistently entertaining play a bore. For this, atrocious casting must be held responsible. The least ineffective player, sur- prisingly, is Tyrone Power; his Dick Dudgeon is neither sympathetic nor subtle, but it has a certain vigour. The rest appear to have had their names chosen out of a hat. As some of the team, Zena Walker and Noel Willman, have shown their capabilities before, the blame must be placed on the selectors.
The result is that the audience is mute when it should be chuckling, chuckling when it should be bellowing. How Shaw, the critic, would have laid into this flaccid interpretation of what, for 1 his own contempt, is the most actable of his plays! And how he would have jeered at the espresso era sets, with their pewter-and-antique, Ye-Newt-Logge-Cabinnc glibness! And if ho had stayed to see that superb penultimate scene—the trial—he would surely have burst. I had consoled myself through the tedium of the first two acts with the belief—the virtual certainty—that no actor, even if he were also the producer o this travesty, could fail in the part of Genera Burgoyne. But fail Noel Willman did.
BRIAN INOLI,
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