The Theatre
"All God's Chillun." By Eugene O'Neill. At the Embassy Theatre, Swiss Cottage.
AMERICA'S foremost playwright's attack on one of America's knottiest social problems is carried out with slapdash fervour. All God's Chillun deals with the marriage of a black man to a white girl, a theme rich in the promise of drama and debate. Then why so short a play ? And why, if the play must be short, burden it with two superfluous scenes and charge the rest so thunderously with emotion that their conflicts are battles in a mist ? Let us examine the play closely.
The first scene, which briefly indicates the childhood friend- ship of Jim and Ella, is unnecessary, its purport being suffi- ciently stamped upon the play by later references. The second scene is effective but perfunctory : Ella's sudden revulsion from the faithful Jim is too arbitrarily engineered. The third scene, in which he declares his love and she, friendless else and fallen from grace, accepts it, is in place and in proportion. But the fourth, which shows them on the church steps facing a symbolic storm of hisses, lays undramatic emphasis on the immediate consequences of their marriage. A subtler and more naturalistic statement of the obvious was called for here.
Mr. O'Neill has left unwritten the most important scene in the play. Between Act I and Act II more than a year elapses. In that time Jim and Ella go to France, where for a time they find happiness. But (and this turning-point in their fortunes represents the dramatist's lost opportunity) gradually there grows on both of them the conviction that they are shirking the real issue : that by living in a land where prejudice is not fevered they are guilty of evasion—an evasion cowardly in itself and for them dangerous, because it precludes all possi- bility of laying those hereditary bogeys which threaten the fabric of their relationship. They decide to return to America.
There was an act to be written round that decision. .
As the play stands, the beginning of the second and last act jerks us suddenly forward to the brink of disaster. In Ella's mind her invincible love for Jim and her ungovernable hatred of his race have twisted themselves already into an obsession. She has now a monster in her brain ; its growth through reason and emotion we have been given no chance to watch, and must reconstruct for ourselves. Accordingly, in the last scenes of the play the shadow of tragedy merges into the shadow of nightmare, and when at last the pair of them win a final chance of happiness from the jaws of disaster the issues at, stake pave been So tossed by violence and blurred by hysteria that their escape has not for us its full dramatic value.
But the play is sincere, savage, and often moving. The author's failure to achieve balance in his structure, and in his approach some measure of detachment, were inevitable. For the same reason that only an American could have handled this theme, no American could have done it justice.
Mr. Robeson's powers as an actor are stffi imperfectly con- trolled. His performance is one of immense force and sin- cerity, at its best when emotions run highest. In the quieter passages, especially where the dialogue is very naturalistic, his timing is a little at fault ; he thinks ahead of his lines, and the illusion of reality is in peril. But his art has the gait and the stature for tragedy, and when tragedy threatens we demand no more of an actor than Mr. Robeson gives us.
The part of Ella offers greater difficulties and higher rewards. Miss Flora Robson conquers the former and earns the latter with brilliance. In the second act she must convey the whole meaning of the play, and convey it while she is on the rack. To make us feel her torments and at the same time to explain what lies behind them is a task of the utmost delicacy. Miss Robson achieves it with triumph, perfectly co- ordinating her simultaneous attacks on our minds and our
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