,‘ The Recruiting Officer." At the Arts Theatre Club.
THE THEATRE
Tins is one of George Farquhar's best plays which, unfortunately, means little to present-day playgoers since our public, though passionately devoted to the theatre—as the English always have been —is grossly and lamentably ignorant of its great dramatic literature— Shakespeare included. This, its misfortune, has its root in our social conditions existing ever since the Civil War. We have had no national or provincial theatres. We have only had sporadic, and largely poverty-stricken commercial enterprise engaged in supplying the public with theatrical entertainment and often frowned upon by the authorities throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in its single-handed struggle against narrow puritanism and prejudice. Warmly sympathetic therefore I am towards the Arts Theatre Club and its management's attempt to take our dramatic art seriously. To revive Farquhar's brilliant and lively comedy of 17o6 is in itself a virtue and this play has even a special historic interest at the present moment because it dates from the second year after the battle of Blenheim, which is actually mentioned in it. Like all Farquhar's work, it gives a vivid picture of contemporary life in England.
But, unfortunately, the present production is full of blemishes which are past redeeming by the engaging performance of Trevor Howard as Captain Plume, the attractive Sylvia of Helen Cherry, and the excellently chosen music arranged by Geoffrey Dunn. The chief blame must be laid on the shoulders of the producer, Alec Clunes, whose work as a producer, always unequal, has here the phoneyness of a bad kind of B.B.C. " production." I mean that sort of production in which essentials are disregarded in favour of irrelevant pointless excrescences. It is unpardonable in a producer of Farquhar to scatter phoney birds from the " flies " when Mr. Balance presents a gun (suitably acclaimed, as it was on the night I was present, by single guffaw from an isolated half-wit in the audience); it is unpardonable to clutter-up the stage with properties so that nobody can move in the market-place without climbing over the steps. of the buildings (the set actually makes good acting impossible); it is impossible to mix unreal realism with pantomimic facetiousness and retain any truth of life or sentiment. The fact is that this sort of production is not at all serious, k:nd aims at getting away with a bluff. Art, any sort of art demands honesty of purpose, seriousness of intention,.and the intelligent adaptation of means to ends: Nobody can hit bull's- eyes without a target, and I am afraid that on this occasion Mr. Clunes has never for one moment caught so much as a glimpse of one.
JAMES REDFERN.
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