STAGE AND SCREEN

The Theatre •

Justice." By John Galsworthy. At the Playhouse

Tins revival of Justice is the first production of a Galsworthy Festival Season which has the backing of a large committee of eminent men and women, the interest of many of whom in the

fortunes of the serious theatre must have been hitherto Un- suspected. The composition of this committee encourages the suspicion that this Festival, as well as being a tribute to a respected writer, is also designed to form a suitable decoration to Jubilee Year. This is an extremely curious development.

Not the least important element in Galsworthy's significance as a dramatist was his success as a critic of the social organism of his period, and we should be more justified in presenting his plays in such circumstances and with such a purpose today, if practical attention had been more widely paid to the notes of protest that • he sounded. Unfortunately much of his criticism is still depressingly applicable at this moment.

These considerations, it must be admitted, do not apply to Justice, and on purely aesthetic grounds we should be glad that they do apply in so many other cases. For Justice and

a few other plays belong to a certain stage of social develop- ment, and the very fact that they have played a practical part in redressing injustices—it is said that this play was instrumental in improving prison conditions, in modifying the rules concerning solitary confinement, and in humanizing the treatment of first offenders—tends to weaken their dramatic effect today. Galsworthy was not, as for instance Hardy was, concerned with an analysis of cosmic defer p : he was a critic of a particular social organism, of a cer'Xin set of social arrangements, and his treatment of a subject with properties less inherently tragic, because more remediable, than Hardy's, to some extent lacks the universality which would permit it to retain its dramatic force even though the circtun- stanecs which originally lent it life had disappeared. But even if this view is correct, which no doubt ninny people will

question, it would be absurd to assert that the effectiveness of Justice has vanished. It has many admirable qualities,

and one that might well be taken as a model by many con- temporary writers : when so much crudely and explicitly propagandist work is being written and performed, one cannot too much admire the way in which Galsworthy uses a dramatic situation to express his opinions, instead of putting tendentious speeches into the niouths of all of his characters.

His subject here is not—as it was in Strife, The Silver Box,

and many other plays—the clash between two social groups, but the conflict between a single person and the organization of society, represented in this ease by the law. The most

moving part of the play is the scene where the weak thwarted Falder, committed to prison for forgery; is shown alone in his cell, driven to collapse by his own fears and, his brutal sur-

roundings and, with the purposiveness of an automaton, joining in the orchestra of banging doors which was the convicts' only method of release frOm their enforced im- potence. Falder is the least articulate person in the play, and his character is the most dynamic. - Most of the • others arc

static and without development ; what we know of them at the end of the play is precisely what we knew of them or might have assumed at the beginning. The most articulate char- acter, the eloquent barrister Frome, never lives at all ; he .is merely an animated megaphone. • . The present production is, on the whole,- a good one. me. Stephen Haggard's Falder is -a superb performance,

revealing the character, as Galsworthy surely intended, not as the central figure of a tragedy, - but as a weakling unable to stand against the pressure of ordinary circumstances and calling for assistance from society. Mr. Evan John's

Cokeson, on the other hand, seemed- to me a cheap and vulgar exploitation which, apart from making • his own part un-

intelligible, sacrificed most of the effect- Of the scenes in the lawyer's office over which he presided, and the same might be said of Mr. Jonathan Field's pitiable incursions as the chaplain

into the prison scenes. lhit these failures are offset by an adthirable performance from Miss" Ffrangon-Davies as Ruth Honeywill, and good acting from- Mr. Arthur Wontner and most other members of the east.- • Justice, twenty-five years after its first production, is still decidedly a play worth seeing.

DEREK VF-RSICHOYLE.