STAGE AND SCREEN The Theatre
"Eden End." By J. B. Priestley. At the Duchess Theatre THERE was little to choose for dramatic merit between Mr. Priestley's two previous plays ; in both one admired the ingenuity of the plot and the technical skill with which it was resolved, in both one felt that one would without regret have sacrificed some of the virtuosity in favour of a less circum- scribed theme. In both, in fact, one was entertained rather than moved, satisfied rather than stimulated. In Eden End the case is altered. The play has fewer obviously dramatic qualities than its predecessors, there is no " plot," in the mechanical sense of the term, to be so dexterously resolved, the theme is broader, the treatment is more naturalistic. If the final impression is only of a qualified success, the success one imagines is one of no common kind. Eden End is by a long way Mr. Priestley's best and most valuable play, and lacks only a little the sense of saturation in its subject and the compulsion that one notices in an achieved masterpiece.
The curtain rises on the sitting-room of Dr. Kirby's house at Eden End. The date is October, 1912 ; the atmosphere is that of the end of a period. In his youth Dr. Kirby had chosen the assured competence of a general practitioner in a provincial town in place of the more spectacular but less certain rewards of a specialist in London. Now, approaching the end of his career, he is mildly regretful of his discretion. He has two daughters : in the elder, Stella, he finds to admire the courage which he himself had lacked. Eight years ago she left Eden End for the stage ; he has had no news of her for three years, but despite this silence assumes that by now she will be a famous actress. Lilian, the younger daughter, has remained at home to keep house for her father, and to nurse an undeclared passion for a local landowner called Geoffrey Farrant, who was once in love with Stella. They have a brother, Wilfrid, a noisy young man whose tastes incline to jazz and barmaids. The domestic background suggests immobility and a rather desperate restraint.
It is Wilfrid's reverence for an actress and not his affection for a sister that makes his welcome of Stella effusive when she suddenly reappears--a little down at heel and plainly not the leading actress of her father's dreams. Lilian, who has always been jealous of her sister's bid for freedom, is chilly : she ex- tracts from Stella the confession that she is married, and that her marriage, like her career on the stage, has been a failure. She is separated from her husband, and her acting has been not before London audiences but in touring companies in the prov- inces. Lilian resents her return, and tells her so. When she sees that Geoffrey Farrant still prefers Stella to herself, she sends for Stella's husband, Charles Appleby, a man with the tastes of her brother Wilfrid and with as much of the great actor in him as there is of the great actress in his wife. It is difficult for Stella, while he is about, to maintain the illusion of success upon which for the moment her father's contentment and her own self-esteem depend. She surrenders to her sister's strategy, and telling her father that they have both received an important engagement joins forces again with her husband and leaves Eden End.
Such a summary does nothing to indicate the skill with which Mr. Priestley has made real the atmosphere of Eden End, nor the deftness with which the interest of the audience in it is sustained without the use of constant action. The centre of the play is in the distrust and conflict of the two sisters, and the scenes between them, which act upon the other elements in the play and unify them in movement in a single direction, are the scenes written with the greatest subtlety and discernment. Elsewhere one was aware of a slight con- fusion of aim. The first act proceeds in rather too casual and too leisurely a way ; one of the characters belongs to a dramatic convention different from the remainder ; some of the dialogue is too high-pitched to cohere with the naturalistic flow of the rest of it. These are faults which could easily be mended, and they do not, in any case, detract considerably from the play's effect. It is admirably acted by a talented east, in which Mr. Ralph Richardson, Miss Alison Leggatt and Mfss Beatrix Lehmann are most conspicuous. •
DEREK VERSCHDYLE.
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