CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THE THEATRE
"The Girl Who Couldn't Quite." By Leo Marks. (St. Martin's.)
FREUD widened the horizons of psychology chiefly by revealing how vast was the territory of the mind which remained unknown, and he did this in such a vivid and dramatic way that most young play- writers who have read The Psychopathology of Everyday Life or other Freudian classics must have thought they had by an amazing stroke of good fortune stumbled upon a whole tangled jungle of dramatic plots. But it did not work out just like that. No doubt the Unconscious is the thedtre splendide of the mind ; no doubt it is there that the most intense dramatic conflicts are continually being worked out ; but events in the underworld of the brain are material for the ordinary theatre only if at 'the end of three acts the dramatist has brought the significant facts into the plain light of day. So after all the doctrine of the Unconscious does not place a great many new ideas at the dramatist's disposal. There is indeed one stock plot: an unpleasant childhood experience, forgotten by the conscious mind, persists in the Unconscious and causes abnormal behaviour ; by means of hypnosis or even simple association the forgotten experience is unburied, and the conflict is resolved.
That is the bare unoriginal idea out of which Mr. Marks has elaborated The Girl Who Couldn't Quite, and—if one forgets the title—he has done this with considerable freshness. The finest thing about it is the conceptio'I of the Cockney tramp who by a com- bination of natural astuteness and human sympathy cures a young girl whose morbid state of mind has resisted the efforts of the best available specialists. Clifford Mollison brings to this part the same sparkle as he showed in The Man from the Ministry, but also a greater subtlety. This actor effortlessly lays aside his own identity and assumes that of the character he is playing, and here he portrays with a great deal of charm the pathos, humour and generosity of the Cockney tramp. Miss Patricia Plunkett as the tramp's " patient" has a less rewarding part to play chiefly because of the stock nature of the situation. There is always a sense of impending anti-climax about this kind of Oct because it so often happens that the child- hood experience which has caused all the trouble is disappointingly trivial compared with the trouble it has caused. Mr. Marks has tried hard to avoid that rock, but it is a prose horror which he has conceived and expressed, and to be wholly convincing this theme requires a heightened and concentrated language which if it cannot burn intensely must at least flicker into something resembling poetry. There was every indication that Miss Plunkett could play such a scene well, but here she was called upon to express emotional tension for periods that seemed at times too prolonged. Miss Louise Hampton made a delightfully acidulous grandmother, though it could hardly be said that she " plastered the back wall of the gallery with her lowest whisper " as others are reputed to Lave done.
HUNTER DIACK.
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