4 , The Wind of Heaven." At the St. James's.
THE THEATRE
Ma. EMLYN WILLIAMS is an accomplished playwright who has the advantage—which Synge and Yeats in their different ways had—of being not only British and a citizen of the world, but also of belonging to a small but ancient country which has retained much of its individuality and culture. Wales has provided Mr. Williams with the raw material of all his best plays, and his professional craft has enabled him to turn this material often to good account. The religious fervour and spirituality of the Welsh, as exemplified in their revivalist meetings and love of music, provides the back- ground of this new play ; but in spite of the undoubted cunning with which Mr. Williams has handled its theme, I cannot agree that he has made it convincing, for it is really too refractory to such professional theatrical treatment.
No doubt it is comforting to many to be led- .as Mrs. Dilys Parry, the woman in the play who has lost her husband in the Crimean War, is—from a scepticism that prevents her from going to church to a belief in super-material values and a sense of the invisible world, and no doubt Mr. Williams has been careful not to fly wholly in the face of reason, making one of his characters offer some if insufficient rational explanations of what occurs ; but the trouble is that we are never so moved by the drama as to believe, or even to wish to suspend our disbelief in what happens. The play is too artfully concocted and the production even more so—
the unnatural posings and obviously timed positionings are cold and chilling in their effect, exactly the opposite of what they are intended to be. Nor was the acting able to remedy this. Miss Wynyard was coldly beautiful, Mr. Williams himself frigidly intense, and only Mr. Lomas at his first appearance, and Megs Jenkins (as the servant Bet) throughout, brought any natural warmth.
JAMES REDFERN.
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