THE THE ATRE.
GRAND GLTIGNOL (FIFTH SERIES) AT THE LITTLE THEATRE.
.THS new programme at the-Little Theatre has one quite admir- able play in it—E. and 0. E., by Mr. Crawahay-Williams. The play is, we feel, just what Rounding the Triangle made us expect from this author. They both have a facility and brutality of wit which reminds us of the Restoration. Some day Mr. Craw- shay-Williams will probably write a modern Marriage a in Mode, but with the poetry left out. Those who saw the Phoenix productions of these pieces will realize that to say so is to blame as well as to praise.
Ail the plays were, as usual, very well acted. Miss Ivy Williams is a new-corner who is as yet not quite at home with her work, but she shows promise, and in the atmosphere of Grand Guignol efficiency ought to do very well. Mr. Nicholas Hannen, who is now playing here, is of course a very good and experienced actor.
The longest of the four little plays is The Unseen, which I Eked very much ; but chiefly, I fancy, because the plot illustrates a doctrine which I have very much at heart. A newly-married couple are devoted to one another. The husband is killed ; at the moment of his death the wife hears his voice and sees his apparition. A year elapses, and the girl vied planchette writing, and later, automatic writing and visual hallucinations, believes herself to be in touch with her dead husband. She consults him hourly in all her affairs, rfianages the estate through his advice, and is, in fact, slipping more and more into this private world of her own. Her parents, alarmed, are very anxious that she should be cured, and a doctor, a hypnotist, is brought down from Paris. To please her parents she consents to be hypnotized, and the doctor successfully suggests that her communications with her dead husband are all a sham and a deceit, that his death has involved complete loss and separation. What she has seen, the tremors and writings of her hand, have been throughout the creation of her subconsciousness. She comes to " cured," believing all the doctor has told her, and the pangs of this second forcible sundering from her lover send her mad. The whole scene of the interview with the doctor is admirably written and admirably acted. It gives the audience some- thing of the sensation that we should have if we saw a man take a beautiful, pulsating Red Admiral butterfly between his hands and deliberately rub and grind the wings till the creature was a heap of dust. Dr. Wilfrid Lay recently wrote a treatise on exactly this theme—the subconscious and therefore hallucina- tory character of psychic phenomena. If the scientist is perhaps
temperamentally unable to learn from the artist or the poet, could he not learn from the metaphysician ? Learn something of the Berkeleyisn theory that, after all, this " every-day real" world cannot be proved to be so real after all, and that the gap between the perception, which is half objective and half sub- jective (the normal one), and that which appears to be wholly subjective is not, after all, so very tremendous. Though writing and vision were perhaps certainly the creation of Jeanne Chabrin, this, let us call it, mythical personification of the mutual love she and her husband had borne each other was not perhaps much 'further from the truth on one side than was Dr. Denavo's dry, positive assertion on the other of the absolute ceasing of the dead man's power to affect the material world through those who loved him.
Previous page
