STAGE AND SCREEN
Old Vic season would at the moment of writing be only to ray that it is the best piece of acting in the two plays so far produced, the first of which showed nothing comparable, but it is unlikely that the rest of the season will see a better performance. Mr. Evans has had a distinguished and varied career on the stage—one remembers with gratitude his success in a number of widely contrasted parts—and it was to be expected that his performance would be an interesting one. But it could not have been foreseen that it would reach this level. The lapse of time may have dulled the impression made by Mr. Gielgud's Richard some years ago, but at the moment it does not seem that it approached the standard achieved by Mr. Evans.
It is a rare pleasure, to begin with, to hear a voice as fine as Mr. Evans' on the stage, rarer still to hear it employed in a sensitive and intelligent speaking of blank verse, rarest of all to find a portrait which is in conception ironic so skilfully established and so consistently maintained. C. E.
Montague wrote that Shakespeare's intention was to draw in Richard " not only a rake and a muff on a throne and falling off it, but, in the same person, an exquisite poet ; to show with one hand how kingdoms are lost and with the other how the creative imagination goes about its work ; to fill the same man with the attributes of a feckless wastrel in high place and with the quite distinct but not incompatible attributes of a typical, a consummate artist." Mr. Evans' interpretation differs from this only in the necessary detail that his Richard is a bad artist as well as a bad king. He is a man who lives only in the aesthethic apprehension of what is immediately around him, whether it is a conspiracy or a cloudy day, and until he has saturated it with his own temperament it does not acquire significance for him. As his temperament is one which works in images, no situation is complete until he has given it expression. He is a poeticiser of experience. "He runs out," in Montague's words, " to meet the thought of a lower fall or a new shame as a man might go to his door to see a sunset or a storm." But unlike the average man, he immediately starts talking about it. As his fortunes decline his methods of giving expression to what he senses become more abstruse and artificial. At the beginning of the play, in a discussion of the newly banished Bolingbroke, they are thoughtlessly flippant ; by the end, when he strives to find a way of comparing his prison with the outside world, they have the ingenuity of a metaphysical con- ceit. His aestheticizing is a perpetual dope to his irresolution. It becomes not merely an alternative to attempting to achieve an object, but a substitute for deciding what the object is. There is a second performance•of uncommon merit in this production. Bolingbroke, Richard's antithesis and corn- plement, the designing resentful man of action, whose steps toward the throne are those by which Richard moves towards death, is played with a beautiful firmness and precision by Mr. Abraham Sofaer, and one will not soon forget the scenes in which he and Mr. Evans appear together. Not all the performances in subsidiary parts reach the level of efficiency generally to be found at the Old Vic, though a few of them are remarkable. Mr. Frank Napier's York was endowed with a vein of comedy which is unusual, but certainly welcome, in a play abnormally empty of comic relief, Mr. David Home makes a curiously rustic figure of Northumberland, and Mr. Alfred Sangster's Gaunt had an oddly petulant vigour. Mr. David Ffolkes' scenery and costumes have considerable merit, and Mr. Henry Cass's production is . bold and con- tinuously exciting.
The Old Vic continues to allow smoking during the per- formance. If it is impossible for this Permission to be confined to cigarettes, it would be a wise move to impose a censorship on the brands of tobacco and cigar brought into the theatre. " The banning of one cigar in action on the Opening night would have been approved as a sanitary measure by every member of the audience who had the misfortune .to come within its effective radius.
DEREK VERSCHOYLE.
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