The • Theatre
[" THUNDER IN THE Am." BY" ROBINS MILLAR. AT TH3 DUKE OF Y0E:a's THEATRE.—" ORPH/E." BY JEAN COCTEAU. AT THE GATE THEATRE STUDIO.—" OTHER . MEN'S WIVES." BY WALTER HACKETT. AT THE ST. MARTIN'S THEATRE.]
A STAGE plunged into total darkness ; a storm raging ; flashes of lightning, roars of thunder ; a man's figure,. illuminated outside French windows, as he brandishes an electric torch ; scurrying of terrified footsteps ; shrieks of the usual maid- servant—are we in for another crook play ?
Patience I—lthe lights will gO up. They reveal the hand- .
somely panelled country residence of a certain Major Vextect whom we soon discover to be one of those • peppery cain- paigners who contract curried digestions on remote outposts • of Empire. The Major is uniformly and intolerably " grumpy " with the living guests in his house-party ; and, amongst the dead, he selects for frequent abuse his own son, Ronnie Vexted, who was killed at the end of the War. Ten years ago ! Yet, Ronnie, a " ratter " with a personality, is incessantly talked about, like Bernice in Miss Susan Glaspell's play, or the invisible but all-important dying man in Tirandello's La vita the ti diedi. That very evening, before the lights went • out, they were all questioning Ronnie, recalling him, in a sdana under the direction of a psychic Miss Newton, with a throaty voice. His mother—a part needlessly overdressed and very formally played, by Miss Violet Vanbrugh—feels his presence in the house ; and no doubt the darkness and the shrieks were meant to make us feel it too.
They were unnecessary ; as was the glimpse of the man
outside, who turns out to be 'merely a motorist in pretended distress, anxious to gain admittance in order to make love to the girl who had been engaged to Ronnie. All this clamour of prelude, this melodramatic attack, seems to me to betray the author's intention, which is contradicted also, throughout, by the stagey production and the manner in which the players are made to heighten the tone and to bellow at one another, in scenes which depend for their pathos on a _certain delicate mystery. A little more naturalness and less noise might have helped us 'better to anticipate the arrival of the dead boy, as he apPears, simply enough, visible to all who knew him, first as the trench-stained soldier, then as a young man in tennis flannels, then neat in a tweed suit ; as a wounded Tommy again—the most painful scene of all, where he silently conveys to his father that he killed himself and was not killed by the enemy ; then in a piece of pure Barrieism as the little boy in pyjamas who would naturally be clearest seen because so best remembered by his foolish mamma ; finally in a diVision of separated selves (another elvish Barrie touch) as young man and tiny boy simultaneously, out of sight of Major Vexted's house-party.
Do they see him as he was, or as each now remembers
him ? He is invisible to the shrieking maidservant ; and, up to a point, the author seems to have intended to throw a refracted Pirandellian light upon him. But when he forces his ghostly-real presence upon his unwilling father he begins to convey information—is, in fact, what old Vexted did not suspect him to have been : the brave " lad's of Mr. Housman's pbem "Shot So quick and clean an ending "- This (at last 1) qinet scene is beautifully played, with his eyes and hands, which are all that are left of him to play it with—since mouth is bandaged and voice silenced—by
Mr. Reginald Haslam, upon whom falls the heavy burden of reincarnation. It is a fine sincere performance by a young actor whom I remember to have seen only once, before, as the shy Nicholas Nickleby of Mr. Nigel Playfair's (*rummies. It may not be Mr. Haslam's fault that he has to shout
through his first secret conversation with the motorist, his
rival, in tones that would have brought all Major Vexted's household about him. One wishes that Mr. Millar's haunted characters had taken a hint from one of them who talks of " this breathless heat that makes one want to talk in whispers." As it is, they vocally defeat the thunder in the air. But in spite of a crude production, inconsistencies, apparent hesitations, the author manages to make his Ronnie Vexted an impressive ghost. And it was a fine resistance of the sentimentality so common in plays that brood over death—in all the Mary-Rosy productions that have consoled or disgusted us (according to our tastes and temperaments) since the War—that he should have made Ronnie one who has played with other people's love for him, annexed their money and even a diamond ring, forged, and done the wrong thing everywhere. But one is ready to excuse him as one lives for a little with his intolerable father. No one could have been long good in the company of Major Vexted.
The Gate Theatre Studio announces itself as " very proud " to be able to present to its members the work of so distinguished a writer as M. Jean Cocteau. I should rather have said that it was very kind of Mr. Peter Godfrey, a director and producer of violently exotic taste, to put himself to so much trouble for the sake of M. Cocteau, the young author of one amusing novel, Thomas 1 'Imposteur, and of several plays and ballets that reveal a painful striving after originality. His version of the Orpheus myth is meant to be terribly original. But under its odd adornments it impresses one merely as a series of squabbles between a Montmartre poet or rapin and his lady friend, who impedes his inspiration, symbolized (I suppose) by the horse who raps out phrases that appear heavy with meaning to Orpheus and imbecile to the jealous Eurydice. She is played in what is perhaps intended to be the Dadaist manner by Miss Moyna Macgill. We are relieved when the inspirational horse is poisoned by a lump of sugar ; mildly amused when Death, as a female surgeon, removes Eurydice, leaving a pair of rubber gloves for Orpheus to return. Not a bad idea, this, for the age of operations ! A latter-day Death, businesslike, coldly competent in scientifically dis- patching mortals, is very cleverly presented by Miss Veronica Turleigh. After that, we get a comic police-sergeant turn " in the manner of Courteline ; and, at the end, Orpheus, Eurydice, and their guardian angel, a glazier who appears to be M. Cocteau in disguise, all sit down to a painted meal, and relapse into the bourgeoisie which, visibly, the author has been trying to amaze. I enjoyed the evening, but wondered, all the time, when M. Cocteau will decide to grow up.
Alarmingly complicated, too, in the crook, but not the. Cocteau, order of obscurity, is Mr. Walter Hackett's Other Men's Wives, which gives Miss Marion Lorne another of her too rare opportunities for the perfect 'mimicry of a dazed and indignant perplexity, and Miss Fay Compton a chance of speaking French as a " fake " hotel-chambermaid. The play is a chain of sudden and often incomprehensible surprises, from the moment when a compromised couple arrive at the supposed hotel near Le Touquet, till the end, when an alleged. detective is apparently about to " pinch " for himself the diamond necklace he has been chasing across three acts. Who, is this detective ? What is he ? We shall never know. But he (Mr. Robert Holmes) and the play are all the more enjoyable in that sheer brain-fatigue forces us, after the first half-hour, to give up the effort to explain them. RICHARD 3-ENNING:s.
Previous page
