Most dramatists require the space of an act at least
in which to " work up interest " and define character. When, as at the Everyman Theatre last week, three producers present four Plays by four authors, the working-up of successive interests in four sets of separate characters may become more fatiguing to the audience than it can have been to the producers, who benefited by a division of labour.
The lightest morsel came first, in Mr. Milne's Wurzel- Flummery which is already known. Mr. Milne easily reconciles us to a fantastic will which allots legacies of £50,000 each to two rival politicians, on condition that they take the name
of Wurzel-Flummery. Personally, if offered that name, together with £50,000, I should accept ; say that Wurzel- Flummery was Czecho-Slovakian, and have it pronounced Worzley. There are ways of evading testamentary conditions of this vexatious kind !
We sank, after that, a good deal with Lord Dunsany's The Lost Silk Hat. Interest couldn't be worked up in the crazy figure of an evening-dressed young man, fuming on the doorstep of • a house bathed in summer-time sunlight, and trying to persuade passers-by to rescue the hat he has left there. Though dressed in the latest style, the young man (Mr. Jack Melford) was apparently Victorian enough to take a silk hat into the drawing-room, and to put it under a sofa.
Interest flagged again, when Mr. Michael Arlen showed us a forlorn lady named Shelmerdene dressing for dinner, in a room that seemed to be inexplicably dark, until we realized that darkness was needed for a " transparency," in which we dimly discerned the lady's husband (lost for ten years) trying to get back to her on the telephone. Thrill of that once-loved voice ! Quavers of regret ! This comes of the Post Office's misguided advice to " say it by telephone "—a phrase I suggest as an alternative title for Mr. Arlen's twenty-minutes' chatter about nothing.
Lastly, interest revived, for Mr. Granville-Barker's Rococo— that riotous caricature of a stuffy family's competition for a gilded vase, which is fortunately smashed in their quarrel about it. This is an amusing trifle in itself. It was made uproariously funny by the richly comic acting of Mr. George Carr as the bewigged little man whose connoisseurship recog- nizes " pure rococo " in the vase, and by Miss Muriel Aked's manner of dropping acid remarks into the turmoil, as she sat and surveyed it from her sofa, and then majestically rose to box the ears of the man in the red wig.
RICHARD JENNINGS.
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