BACHELOR TALK
THE Haymarket Theatre has a formula of its own—the formula of light comedy and pleasant make-believe. Mr. Levy, the newcomer, has- accepted it, and will apparently be able to exploit it nearly as well, in time, as Mr. Milne. True, his first act, which includes a prolonged after-dinner debate between a party of bachelors on an " all-man holiday," gives one the impression that he is trying to be vaguely Shavian. The bachelors have determined to detest Woman. In consequence, they feel compelled to think, talk and write incessantly about Her. This abstract debate needs compression. It is not new. And it is not witty, as it might have been in Mr. Shaw's treatment. But then the Woman enters through a window. She (Miss Fay Compton) is very artificially dragged in to break the monotony of the bachelors' week-end. Need it be said that, like all the other bachelors in all the " pawky " plays written since Love's Labour's Lost, they all (except the octoge- narian judge) at once fall dead in love with her ? And we of the audience are profoundly grateful to her- for putting some check upon their celibate humours, and their tedious habit of begj1ming every sentence in crusty character, just as though each were producing a- label Rnd tying it round his neck, to mark his idiosyncrasy.. . . Just here you touch the rather irritating unreality unavoidable by the make-believe comedy —you wonder why the host, a rich and easy-going man, dis- creetly played by Mr. Leon Quartermaine, should have chosen to surround himself by such stiffing-bores as a cheeky, chatter- ing youth named Honey, who writes minor poetry ; a vile- mannered and sulky clock-golf maniac named Crofts, early disappointed in love, and shown up with almost too realistic an accuracy by Mr. Bromley Davenport ; and a- quarrelsome, empty-headed bank clerk who does nothing all day but twiddle his thumbs, show his teeth and feel insulted when anybody speaks to him, while he dresses (the weather being hot, " too hot," and the county Cornwall) in a black bank clerk's coat, patent leather shoes and white spats.. Mr. Sebastian Smith makes a comic creation of this nobody, this Brown. But why, again, were he and the others invited ?
They were invited in order to exemplify stage bachelorhood ; in order to speak according to the convention of their farcically touched- types ; in order to pass easily from crustiness to senti- mentality ; in• order to be in the tone of light comedy, which will have us- laugh and yet like people whom, in real life, we should do almost anything to avoid asking to stay with us for
Previous page
