THE THEATRE
The Unquiet Spirit By Jean-Jacques Bernard. (Arts).
IT was perhaps inevitable that this revival of M. Jean-Jacques Bernard's muted and wistful little play should seem in the nature of a resurrection. Nothing is so dead as the novelties of yesterday, and in 1949 it is nof easy to understand why The Unquiet Spirit was so much admired-when it first came to London a quarter of a century ago. Then admired for being quiet and understated, it only seems cold and slight today. The play's exiguous central theme, borrowed from Maeterlinck's Blue Bird, is that of two Platonic souls, unknowingly but also- unsuccessfully seeking each other throughout their earthly lives. It is not a theme to capture or hold one's atten- tion through three acts. Part of the fault must lie with the translator, who seems to have devitalised the dialogue and to have rendered much of it quite absurd ; but the fact remains that the story of the rich woman, Marceline, drawn to the down-and-out Antoine like a needle to a magnet, but never meeting him, is not innately a dramatic story, while certain passages such as that in which one of her lovers urges her in the Tuileries Gardens to take up opium-smoking (" Come round to my place at four o'clock tomorrow ") are nearly ludicrous.
As the tormented wife, compelled by impulses she cannot rationalise, to make a detour to Saint Jean de Luz on her honeymoon (the twin soul is in the vicinity) or to sit for days on end outside a Parisi, prison, Miss Margaret Rawlings does her best to convince us of her unhappy situation. Her performance is sometimes charming and frequently intense, with a congested, emotional intensity that the part can hardly bear ; but all the same it is to the jolly placid husband (Mr. William Mervyn) that one's sympathies go out.
The few moments at which the play comes alive chiefly occur in a scene between Antoine, out of work, and his girl Ida, to whom he tries to explain that they must separate. Miss Jenny Laird dealt very com- petently with Ida, and, the result was moving—maybe because this fragment of life seemed real and intelligible, whereas Miss Rawlings, blundering on in her miserable search for her twin soul without knowing what she is doing or even that she has twice passed him in her life, has a role that is thoroughly artificial and so, uninteresting. M. Anouilh's Antigone is showing Londoners what gleaming and exciting work is now being written in Paris. It thus seems doubly needless to have revived this faded piece, and to have put Miss Rawlings into a part which does her no kind of justice.
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