CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THEATRE
"Detectiva Story." By Sidney Kingsley. (Princes.) To compare (as I see somebody has done) this American play with the British film called The. Blue Lamp seems to me rather far- fetched ' • but you could easily, and perhaps suggestively, contrast them. Detective Story shows us three crowded hours of not particularly glorious life in the detective squad room of a New York police station. As with The Blue Lamp, its purpose is docu- mentary as well as dramatic ; an exciting central story competes for our interest with the professional mysteries of police routine. But there the comparison ends and the contrasts begin. To a certain extent this was bound to be the case, for the maintenance of law and order in New York presents problems differing in degree, and sometimes in kind, from those which confront the Metropolitan police. But apart from this there is a fundamental difference in approach. The Blue Lamp tried to keep everything life-size, using under-statement as a deflationary agent whenever the appearance of objectivity was threatened. In Mr. Kingsley's play everything tends to get larger than life, so that we do not come away from it, as we do from The Blue Lamp, feeling that what we have seen does more or less correspond—in its essentials as well as in its trimmings —to what actually goes on in a police station.
There may, of course, be detectives like Macleod whose idealism has been twisted into relentless inhumanity by a streak of inherited sadism, and some of them may be married to girls who, though distinguished for the nobility of their characters, did undergo, before their marriage, an operation for abortion following a love-affair with 'a • racketeer. But when Macleod's superior invites both Macleod's wife and her former lover to come to the police station (where Macleod, who has just beaten up the abortionist, is still on duty) in order to cross-question her about the illegal operation performed on her seven years earlier, I find it difficult—indeed I find it impossible—to believe that what we are can justly be described as a tranche de vie.
Detective Story is, in fact, an effective melodrama, marred only slightly by those pretensions to philosophy which—as in so much contemporary American drama—never seem to carry us beyond a vague self-pity. It is acted by a large, reasonably competent cast led by Mr. Douglass Montgomery. The producer, Mr. David Gray, has tackled with fair success the difficult task presented by a stage on which only a minority of the numerous characters are at any given time soliciting our attention, the remainder being just left lying about until their services are required, like the reserve ferrets
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