CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THEATRE
"They Got What They Wanted." By Louis d'Alton. (Phoenix).
How much would we not, all of us, give to be able to foresee the future ! And how particularly interesting and advantageous it would be if we could not merely discern the broad panorama of coming events but could foretell with accuracy how each fresh development was going to pan out from the moment it first loomed, hull down, on our horizon ! And what a frightful bore it is when we are granted these facilities in the theatre !
That is the main trouble with They Got What They Wanted. We don't mind knowing, as we intuitively do, from the moment when the curtain rises, that by the time it finally falls the feckless Irish family will have got at least as much as they deserved out of the vast legacy to which they are precariously putative heirs ; it is our unfailing prescience on a tactical level that comes, after a very short time, to irk us. The dilemmas and deflations, the ruses and the rhodomontade—once they have started, we know how they will go on, for upon the stage the behaviour of the Irish, unless handled with a certain genius, is governed—like a crossword puzzle —by an element of predetermination. As with a cuckoo-clock. we admire the complicated mechanism, the ingenious and original result ; but there is, after a time, a limit to the impatience with which we wait to hear it strike again.
Perhaps, if Mr. Arthur Sinclair and Miss Sara Allgood had played the parts here taken by Mr. Mark Daly and Miss Christine Hayden, one would have felt differently about the play ; but the cast as a whole act with spirit rather than with inspiration, and although Messrs. Liam Redmond and Joe Linnane contribute amusing sketches, the general level of the playing is not high enough to redeem the entertainment from a cheerful mediocrity.
PETER FLEMING.
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