The Theatre
[" THE BREADWINNER." By W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM. AT
THE VAUDEVILLE THEATRE. "THE PASSING OE THE ESSENES." BY GEORGE MOORE. AT THE ARTS THEATRE CLUB.—" MARRIAGE I LA MODE." BY JOHN DRYDEN. AT TIIE LYRIC, HAMMERSMITH.] M. SOMERSET MAUGHAM reminds one, this time, of the lazy schoolboy who shows up a patched copy : so good, in this passage, that one longs to award him top marks as the best of our living writers of comedy ; so feebly farcical, in another, that one longs to rap him over the knuckles.
How clever his satirical manner (parodying the tragic Strindberg) of reversing judgment • upon the troops of wronged women, who have been pitied as slaves to tyrannical man ! How smartly the door of Charles Battle's comfortable villa at Golders Green is slammed by him as he escapes, ruined, from his selfish wife and the children who bore him. A little long-winded, these children, but how one hates them, and how enjoyable it is to hate them, after having shed anachronistic tears over their million counterparts who have moaned over the footlights about the oppression of parents upon the young ! An admirable theme outlines itself. Will Mr. Battle waver and relent ? Will a cascade of sentiment be played over him ? No, he is like Mr. Mauglam• He is firm. He is even a little cruel. Let him follow Norah and all the others out of the door. And let Miss Marie Lohr, excellently self-satisfied as his bland wife, turn tearfully to her children (soon to be her victims) and say : " My poor darlings, now I have only you to live for " That last line or curtain " I present, without charge, to Mr. Maugham in place of the utterly ineffective one about Tasmania he has for the acted version, or the hardly more effective " I don't feel quite well " of the printed book. Charles does well to depart.
But, alas! why, before he goes, must we have a ridiculous bit of padding which throws a vamping lady upon him for an incredible scene where she tries to convince him that he's in love with her ? Why also another attempted seduction scene which would have been called exceedingly unpleasant in days when anything was so called—a scene where an outspoken modern virgin (as she is careful to assure Charles in a daring passage) tries to get the weary man to elope with her and to act as her souleneur while she blackmails elderly men like him ? Why these " unfunny " horrors ?
Plays " have their fates " with us ; our moods control our judgments ; and it was a mild relief, after all the brightnes„, and bitterness that have been thrust before us in the theatre this autumn, to be lulled by the gently insinuating prose of Mr. George Moore at the Arts Theatre Club the other night. Beauty, " pure " Beauty, still lurks in quiet places, one thought —with a blush at the thought, as one remembered a sharp tirade in Mr. Maugham's latest novel, Cakes and Ale, where he seems to repudiate the cult of that essence. Yet here it. was !—amongst the cenobites of Mr. Moore's imagination ; beauty audible in their simple utterance, visible in their grave white-clad figures, moving in a clear light against lonely hills. As readers of The Brook lierith will remember, it pleases Mr. Moore to feign that Jesus of Nazareth survived the Cross. and returned in later days to live amongst a remote com- munity of the mountains. May I venture to remark in passing that there is no evidence whatever that the Jesus of history had anything to do with the Essenes ? His indifference in recorded incident, to lustrations and other ceremonial rites, points the other way, and Dr. Eciwyn Bevan, who probably knows as much as any man living about this thrilling trans- itional period, has written that the idea " may be left to cranks and writers of fiction."
But let that pass. It is enough that Mr. Moore would like Jesus to have been an Essene, to have passed in later days into a mood of contemplation sceptical of all action, and, in that mood, which is also one of passive reliance upon God's unaided purpose for the world, to have met, there in the lands beyond Jordan, the fanatical figure of Paul of Tarsus, the real founder of official Christianity. Consent for the moment to accept those assumptions (if they do not shock you), and what more poignantly powerful situation could there be than this confrontation of the apostle who said that " if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain " with the living body of I • who withdrew " to seek a tranquil death in distant shades " ?
It appears that the main occupation of the Court of Poly- damns, usurper of Sicily—as exhibited in Sir Nigel Mayfair's version of Dryden's Marriage a la Mode—was indefatigably to ascend and descend an arched staircase. They went up, all of them—even the old " court lady," Artemis—just for the pleasure of coming down again, whether gouty or light of limb. When they were not joining in the staircase parade they were dodging below it, in a grotto, which appeared to be either the contemporary equivalent of a cocktail bar, served by a negro " shaker," or a dark entrance to shrubberies reserved for amorous encounters. Thus was the artificiality of the period accentuated by suburban fantasy ! As to the play, it has been praised here and there by professors who never go to the theatre. "But" (murmured a dramatist to me as we left the Lyric, Hammersmith, the other night), " what would a manager say if one sent him that sort of stuff to-day ? " Yes, what ? It is one of Dryden's " mixed " comedies mingling an incredible, an unintelligible romance, reminiscent of the less probable passages in The Winter's Tale, with the customary symmetrical farce and " amatory battledore and shuttlecock " (as Professor Saintsbury describes it) that sur- feits us in a hundred Restoration intrigues. The one bright spot is the superficially consistent figure of the " affected lady," Melantha, a part in which Miss Athene Seyler gives one of her finest performances. There is a passage of rhymed couplets that falls delicately, if irrelevantly, on the ear, making one wish to see a revival of one of Dryden's, or even Orrery's, tragedies in that metre. And, at the Lyric, there are two Dalmatian dogs, of British birth (as Miss Seyler in- formed us in a delightfully witty speech), whose demeanour on the first night manifested an exquisite contempt for the whole eccentric business—the one dismally nosing the mimes in their meaningless movements, the other languishingly rolling on his back in an attempt (abundantly successful) to divert the audience's attention to himself. RICHARD JENNINGS.
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