The Theatre
" Casanova." Produced by Erik Charell. At the Coliseum.
" EVEN if you had not sought me out," roared Casanova to I forget which jewel in the crown of Europe's eighteenth- century womanhood, " we were destined to meet." That was the trouble. Predestination hung over the play like a fog. Venice—Tarragona—Vienna—St. Petersburg—Bohemia —and back to Venice again : we were in for the Grand Tour and we knew it. Dazzled and deafened in one capital, we braced ourselves to be dazzled and deafened in the next. Surfeited with the successive galaxies for which it provided a geographical excuse, we were tempted to cry, with the younger Pitt : " Roll up the map of Europe " But there was no escape. We were tied to an itinerary of unrelieved magnificence.
In the grand manner of its presentation, no less than in the Grand Tour itself, this oppressive element of predestination re- curred. It was easy to be amazed, impossible to be surprised. We soon learnt, and soon tired of the knowledge, that a prac- ticable window meant an outraged husband, a flight of steps a cascade of pageantry : that if we glimpsed a uniform, we would shortly review a regiment. It was the same with the humour. A joke announced its approach as unmistakably as a wild boar breaking cover. " Even if they had not tripped up," we might have said of the comedians, "they were destined to fall suddenly over backwards." Much of the acting, and its background of stage conventions governing situations in which one of the characters was supposed to he invisible, inaudible, or unrecognizable—these things could not surprise or intrigue us, for they had insulted our childish intelligence many years ago from the stage of pantomime. The plot owes too many impulses to Baedeker and too many repressions to Bowdler ; the amorist's Odyssey, to which the picaresque method has been too arbitrarily applied, cannot engage our interest either in the man or his fortunes.
All this is as much to say that Casanova feasts the eye and starves those other attributes which expect a square meal in the theatre. Those who can thrive on visual splendour alone—on finery by the ton, on corybantics by the battalion, on six real horses and a donkey, on a navigable stage and an orchestra whose unseen shoes (I am sure) were buckled— these can ask no more than Herr Erik Charell's lavish hand has given them. His parade of splendour can be criticized, as such, for lacking the touches of sophistication and wit, the gleams of the unexpected, which Mr. Cochran has taught us to appreciate. Herr Charell's machinery, which can skim the spectacular cream off continents and centuries and serve it up without delay, is made the vehicle for a tradition of grandeur whose very opulence gives it a slightly passé flavour ; but for a mass attack the methods of the Old Guard are perhaps the best, and London is not likely to hold out against them.
The playing is on the whole undistinguished. Mr. Arthur Fear's Casanova, if he appeared to seduce more from a sense of duty than from anything else, at any rate sang extremely well. I do not know why he gave me the impression that he had just won a prize for something. Miss Dorothy Dickson charmed us ; Fritulein Marianne Winkelstein and Tamara danced delightfully ; and Miss Marie Lithr perfectly judged her short but effective scene. For the rest, even where the material is thinnest, it is impossible not to admire the dresses and the discipline : to say nothing of the donkey.
PETER FLEMING.
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