THEATRE
Blind Man's, Buff. By Ernst Toiler and Denis Johnston. (St. Martin's.) Wish You Were Here. By Arthur Kober, .1Joshua Logan and Harold Rome. (Lon- don By Ben Jonson. (King's, Hamrnersmith.)
A DOCTOR'S wife commits suicide. He thinks to hush it up and tries to persuade his mistress of eighteen months before—also a doctor—to sign a false certificate. A servant blabs her bits of gossip and he is arrested and tried for murder. Partly because of his own pompous stupidity in refusing to play the legal game of the rules of evidence, partly because the " expert" witness gives prejudiced if unintentionally false testimony, he is found guilty. Later the law discovers the truth and he is freed. The story, as of most good plays, is simple. The dramatic technique employed—and this is not so true of most good plays—is sometimes elementary and certainly, with its short scenes and snatched dramatic climaxes, unfashionable. More serious, however, is the fact that the authors seem unwilling to resolve their, purpose. Is this a play about justice, legal hypocrisy, human failures—or all and more ? There are dramatic climaxes to all three runs, but never a sufficient climax of dramatic motivation. Moreover, since the two leading parts are neither obviously nor totally, consistent, whether taken singly or in their relationship to one another, the acting devolves on what should technically be secondary players in secondary parts. Yet the thing does, as near as a jury verdict, come off. This is not an important play, but to my mind it is an example of that dramatic genre which should form the back-bone if not the cerebral heights of West End theatre. Miss Elizabeth Allan and Mr. Dennis Price struggle gamely with the two doctors ; both players looked to me as if they could make more of Nor parts if given the sympathetic help of a more skilful producer. In an exciting Court scene the contrast of desiccated bleak efficiency and confidently jovial cunning of the . two opposing barristers engaged in their legalist danse macabre are perfectly found by Mr. Douglas Wilmer and Mr. Hugh Manning, while Mr. Newton Blick watches from the bench, a delicately restrained portrait of legal detachment curiously wrought by our most notable Shakespearian clown. Perhaps even more notable—the part is better too— is Mr. John Phillips's State Solicitor, a cruelly virtuous man—the personification of Prosecution — cast into the frightening dilemma of discovering his beloved " jus- tice" has failed. Messrs. Phillips, Wilmer, Manning and Blick are in fact all memorable, and if I repeat myself in naming them it is because we are seldom given in one play the opportunity of seeing four examples of supporting acting in the finest traditions of the English theatre. This is Miss Frances Day's first venture in management. It is to her credit that she should have chosen such a play : not great perhaps, not glamorous nor sexy—but simply extremely good.
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I cannot understand the fuss about why the Lord Chamberlain passed Wish You Were Here. It is neither so undressed nor for that matter so well dressed as the Windmill Revues, and for all the queerly disinterested necking going on and on all over the stage it is about as sexually stimu- lating as an outdoor bathing pool on a rainy autumn afternoon. Certainly its whole theme—a little sickening through surfeit—is sex in a Holiday Camp, blatant, banal and unbeautiful, but equally certainly it is all so incredibly dull that the effect—if any—on public morals, even among the retarded adolescents at whom it is aimed, must be the reverse of aphrodisiac. Mr. Dickie Henderson and Mr. Christopher Hewett struggle through as first-class come- dians bereft of even second-class material, and Miss Shani Wallis and Miss Elizabeth Lamer struggle. The rest of the cast do not engage much in the fight, and it is sympto- matic that at presumably enormous expense
a whole bathing pool has to be brought on the stage and two fully dressed men chucked into it in order to get a couple of laughs into the first half of the show at all.
Mr. Donald Wolfit 's Volpone is as good as ever, a sadistic, cynical, richly vulpine performance wagging its tail spiritually in the face of caricature and getting away with it very nearly every time. Mannered, of course, and perhaps a little overbearing in the, actor's as distinct from the character's bearing, but this is understandable since Mr. Wolfit has to carry all before, behind and around him or sink. Mr. Wolfit falls short only in distinguishing the Magnifico of Venice from a merchant by an occasionally assumed near- elegance of bearing ; this is not rich enough ; the luxury of Volpone's taste must • be absolute; professional and not amateur. He is best, of course, during the masquerading scenes ; at such moments, when showing us a person playing a part, he is always fine. The Mosca of Mr. John Wynyard is ener- getic but not credible and Mr. Michael Blythe makes a good stylised Voltore. For the rest, there are one or two brave attempts, for the scenery 'dismay—might not Mr. Wolfit consider using only curtains?—and for the production a measure of astonishment which is by now not quite so sympathetic as it was before.
DEREK MONSEY
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