CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THEATRE
THE Americans of today who settle in Paris, France; may be up to all the tricks of Gracious Living (that toothsome speciality of the Cunard Company's copy-writers), but, my goodness, how far they fall Below the standards set by their exquisite predecessors : for example, the Proberts of The Reverberator, Henry James's nouvelle— who were, I have no doubt, a just enough reflection of reality. For that reason, among others, one is not for a moment unaware of the rich, not to say cloying, period flavour in Miss Dodie Smith's leisurely dramatisation (into three acts of three scenes each) of the story ; a flavour which Mr. Oliver Messel strengthens tastefully with his many pretty versions of the basically monstrous fashions of the period. This is fine. It is Gracious Theatre. But when the elegant package has been unwrapped, layer by layer, that hard little, sharp-edged object which one had expected to find in the tissue- paper (that nugget of imaginative truth, of significance, or whatever one likes to call the solid vein that James would, by circuitous excavation, arrive at) is observed to be missing.
The fault lies surely in the very project itself rather thah in the execution of it ; for there are subtleties which obstinately resist deportation from the snug decorum of a printed page to the vulgar glare of a painted stage (even when decorated by Mr. Messel) under the cruel eyes of that many-headed, hungry, impatient and unreason- able brute, the audience. Let us imagine that James never existed. Here is a new play by Dodie Smith. Mr. Dosson is a millionaire from Buffalo (went to work at the age of twelve, &c.), and he has come to do Europe with his daughters, his two chickens." The younger girl, Francie, beautiful, innocent, candid, golden-hearted, falls in love with Gaston Probert, the wealthy, art-loving son of a Frenchified American, and art-loving, father. Gaston adores her for he " innate delicacy." After much hesitation his family, centripetal around the art-loving Mr. Probert, consents to this really unsuitable match. Enter a bluff New Yorker, a coarse journalist, who notes Francie's sweet prattling about Gaston's family and cables off a scurrilous cable to the Reverberator." Disaster : disgrace. Francie could easily lie her way out, but, unpractised in the ways of European social comedy, refuses. The romance is over. But wait—Gaston and Francie meet later by chance in a painter's studio, and it comes out that Francie spoke thus to the journalist only out of gratitude, because it was through him, indirectly, that she had met Gaston. How sweet, after all. Francie's " innate delicacy " (shining through her ignorance of the conventions) is rekindled for Gaston. &c.
Seeing such a new play, one would say, firmly suppressing all irritation, that it might do well enough as a novel. There the theme might have room to expand, to show itself in all aspects ; characters might there have that rarified air to breathe which alone can vivify them ; the storm in the coffee-cup might there appropriately symbolise the sundering Atlantic. But all goes stiff in the theatre. Situations congeal around lumpish characters, and the mighty moral apparatus squeaks with hardly more subtlety than a romantic tale in a women's (or ladies') weekly. Miss Dodie Smith set herself a task too difficult to be much better than thankless. Miss Brenda Bruce, a fine actress, did much the same in tackling Francie, not because she is miscast—I do not think that she is—but because Francie is a character meant to be realised by the inward eye, not seen by the ordinary gross physical means. (I doubt whether a committee of Muses could have cast anyone else more successfully.) Mr. Scott McKay and Miss Maxine Audley, among those with lighter burdens, give highly creditable performances. The production is by Mr. Peter Glenville.
Oscar Wilde's Lord Savile is a gay aristocrat placed in an awkward position : he is about to marry the beautiful Miss Sybil Merton when a fashionable clairvoyant, Mr. Podgers, assures him that he will commit a murder. Well then, reasons Lord Savile, let me get my murder out of the way before the wedding, so that I may go to the altar with a clear conscience. So he tries his hand on various unwanted aunts and uncles, and is frustrated cruelly at every attempt. Miss Cox's adaptation has splendid possibilities as farce, but it is described as comedy and for the most part played as such (why this genteel fear of farce ?). The result is quite lamentable. Perhaps I should have thought net; highly of it if I.had been able to hear a little more of the dialogue ; but then I was sitting a few rows back,
and I suppose one mustn't ask too much. The only actor who seemed quite at home all the time was Mr. Milo Sperber, who plays the obliging anarchist, always ready with explosive clocks, spherical bombs, detonating umbrellas or whatever you fancy. To everyone
else the farce was Greek tragedy. IAIN HAMILTON.
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