THE THEATRE.
" 1.1:1.b. GODDESS " AT THE AMBASSADORS THEATRE.
" For the Destiny drives us together, like deer in a pass of the hills,
Above is the sky, and around us the sound of the shot that kills ; Pushed by a Power we see not, and struck by a hand unknown, We pray to tho trees for shelter, and press our lips to a stone."
• • • " Shall I list to the word of the English, who come from the uttermost sea ?
`The Secret, hath it been told you and what is your message to me ? '
It is nought but the wide-world story how the earth and the heavens began, How the gods were glad and angry, and a Deity once was man."
SIR ALFRED LYALL.
A FAMINE, the intrigues of a corrupt priesthood, the troubles of a superstitious people, the reforming efforts of an honest priest, and finally the simplicity of a beggar-girl, whom the priests would have impersonate the incarnate Goddess Kali, such is the theme of the play at the Ambassadors Theatre. It is a theme that is necessarily interesting to all of TM How far is it right to deceive people for their good ? How can we be sure that in upsetting an old faith we have something to set in its place ? How far in deception may we go for the sake of friend or lover ? If not in actuality, we have all of us concerned ourselves with such problems in imagination.
Unfortunately, Niranjan Pal, the author'of the present play,
has constantly fallen between two stools in the presentation. For instance, the sentimental Western conception of love greatly upsets what a purely Eastern imagination would have made an austere theme. The author has that imperfect command of language which makes impassioned flights turn to glibness ; and we have, besides, a compromise between a play of pure and impassioned ideas and a plot of violent action.
The native actors are in the same dilemma. Cut loose from the strict tradition of native acting, they have not acquired the naturalistic Western style. The consequence of all this is that the whole piece in conception and presentation has a certain naiveté, almost a helplessness, before the force of the thoughts and passions with which it deals.
But its faults are to some extent counterbalanced by the really remarkable, though simply contrived, local colour. Some- thing of the dignity of ritual and the impressive, unflinching knowledge of the human heart which lies behind the gongs and bells, the incense and drums of the temple, is brought before us. There is something terrible in all ritual, whether it be the Christian ritual of the Mass or the worship of the " many- breasted." The Jesuit and the Brahmin have put aside the pretty fairy tale to which we Northerners and Protestants instinctively cling. I mean the notion of the purity and unassailability of the human intellect. The ritualist acknowledges the fact, to us so repellent, that in the rhythmic beating of the drum and the hypnotic movement of the dancer, or in the darkness and stabbing candle-flames of the shrine, there lies something which affects not our hearts and our emotions only, but through them what we believe to be our inmost self. They are realists, these people, and in The Goddess a most ancient ritual is, if not altogether brought before us, at least excellently suggested.
We see the young priests at the ceremony of renewing the caste marks, there is the Brahminical thread, there are the patches and barrings in grey and red. We see the priests, corrupt or disinterested, overwhelmed by something that is too powerful for them. They have diverted this something to their own ends, pure or impious ; they have stolen the temple offerings, or in imagination set up some Platonist abstraction, but in the end the forces have been too much for them. Even the Deceit, the slim, ruthless, human panther—agent of their will—becomes instead the tool of some implacable force—the " Becoming and Perishing," upon the wheel of whose iteration the visible universe is bound. And so perhaps it is not fantastic to say that the plaT's very helplessness and lack of coherence, combined with the really exotic note struck by dress, by caste mark, by lithe movements, and by dark, liquid eyes, all emphasized the peculiar impression which the totality would make upon any sensitive mind.
TARN.
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