THE THEATRE.
TUE STAGE SOCIETY : " AT THE GATES OF THE KINGDOM," A PLAY IN FOUR ACTS BY KNUT HAMSUN.
intE Stage Society has done well in giving us a play by the famous Norwegian author whose novel, Growth of the Soil, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1920, is well known in this eountry. Although At the Gates of the Kingdom is a play complete in itself, I feel that in its place as the first part
of a trilogy, " written round the life and spiritual development of the character Kareno," it might prove less open to the criticism I am about to make. As it stands, however, the first impression received is one of provincialism.
By " provincialism " I mean that curious superficiality arising from lack of experience, intellectual or imaginative, which seems common to men and women living in small, out-of-the-way, self- contained countries, or at the borders of empires. We are all familiar with the music-hall representation of the yokel fresh from the countryside who gapes in wonder and astonishment at the motor-'buses and dares not cross the street. The urban population laughs at such a spectacle, but the fact is that we are all in some matters " provincial." It might be thought, then, that this " provincialism " is really freshness, and that the yokel who can be amazed at the traffic of London has the advantage of us whom familiarity has dulled, But whether this be true or not, we cannot go back on experience, we cannot shed our knowledge by merely shutting our eyes to it ; therefore, if our provincial friend were to take us by the coat-sleeve and expatiate seriously on the wonders of the motor-'bus, we should very quickly become bored.
We have all known this sort of boredom ; we have felt it when reading Mr. Wells on God ; we have felt it whenever the Communist, the Christian Scientist, the Theosophist, the Cubist, the Eugenist, the Liberal, the Tory or the Bolshevik has unfolded to us his own particular explanation of the world's miseries without a touch of redeeming irony, that is without consciousness of the painful inadequacy of any of these intellectual formulae to the reality of the universe. Now this provincialism springs rather from a lack of imagination than from a lack of experience, do we often find none of it in men who have led narrow and secluded lives while it may still cling to busy men of affairs.
The first mark of provincialism in Mr. Knot Hamsun's play is the fact that its chief, character is an author. I suspect all artists who write about artists, just as I would suspect all scientists who wrote about scientists. It is to me a fundamental sign of weakness. The artist's business is to express the truth just as the scientist's is ; he ought not to indulge in sentimental heroics about himself and his mission—that is mere play-acting, insincerity ! Mr. Knut Hamann shows us a young writer, a sociologist, with no money and no appointment, whose writings have incurred the displeasure of his University professors on account of their originality.
A Professor Gylling visits him and hints that if he will modify his views all will go well with him. He will have a University appointment and the Professor's own publishers will publish his book—suitably corrected. The young man, Kareno, refuses, and discovers that a friend who has received his doctorate and has just lent him money has kindly obliged Professor Gylling in the desired manner by writing a conventional thesis. He returns his friend's money, denouncing him as a traitor to the cause, and in the next act Kareno has his manuscript returned by the publishers. Now, there may be Universities where this sort of thing occurs and countries so small that they possess only one University and only one publisher ; but a University of Professor Gyllings would have no standing in modern Europe, and after all Mr. Knut Hamun was only born in 1860. We have all witnessed the appearance of Albert Einstein and the General Theory of Relativity—the most revolutionary scientific theory in the world's history—and we have seen Einstein from being an employee in the Swiss Patent Office become a Professor at the :University of Berlin, at the age of forty-two, so really the framework of Mr. Hamsun's play is totally unconvincing. Granted that in pure science a bold thinker encounters fewer prejudices and less hostility than in any other sphere, yet I cannot even find myself interested in Kareno as portrayed in At the Gates of the Kingdom. There is no sign of detachment in the author. I found myself longing for a touch of irony, a 'sign of intellectual freedom in the play, instead of this oomplete identification of the dramatist with his Kareno and this naive belief in the blackness of Professor Gylling. However, the wife, Elina, superbly played by Miss Jeanne easel's, was a well- drawn character, and in spite of the play's crudity it left one with a desire to see the rest of the trilogy. Mr. Franklin Dyall achieved another success as Kareno, and the production by Mr. Theodore Komisaryevsky was first-rate.
W. J. TURNER,
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