STAGE AND SCREEN
THE THEATRE
" Geneva." By Bernard Shaw. At the Malvern Festival
BESIDE Malvern on the map this week we should write : " Here be lions.". For " a great .number of those who have 'rendered themselves celebrated by their works and talents " are present at the Tenth Annual Festival, and we may also
behold Mrs. Leo Hunter in a dozen of her varieties, while the dramatic critics have the invited air of a latter-day branch of The Pickwick Club. As at Eatanswill there has been a
public breakfast, a fête champetre to a great number of those who have rendered, &c., &c. Not since Eatanswill can there
have been quite such a blaze of beauty, and fashion, and literature : " There were half a dozen lions from London— authors, real authors, who had written real books, and printed them afterwards—and here you might see 'em, walking about, like ordinary men, smiling and talking—aye, and talking pretty considerable nonsense too, no doubt with the benign intention of rendering themselves intelligible to the common people about them." Malvern this year has even more than half a dozen such lions ; it has a pride. • The Malvern audience only needs a little more intelligence to make it all that a festival audience ought to be. The opening
play, Mr. Shaw's long-awaited Geneva, called on that intelligence
and found it lacking. Over and over again it let out indis- criminate whoops of laughter at things which Mr: Shaw obviously meant for serious statements. The shrug with which this political exposition concludes is a genuinely despairing one, and the sallies which lead up to this are food only for thoughtful laughter, if laugh we must at the exposure of our plight.
The first two acts of this play were written long before the third, are far more frankly farcical, and serve as mere ante-chambers to the final court of justice. They are much less urgent and important in their matter, though full_ of quips and definitions that have the lighter Shavian ring. SinctiOns, for example, are defined by a brace of pleasing instances : " Take oil. Motor-oil is a sanction if yoti withhold .
it ; castor-oil is a sanction if you administer it." But_ the point and essence of Geneva is the, very long third act in
which three easily recognisable trouble-makers, two of them dictators and the other a militant general, are . arraigned for destroying the liberty of Europe. The author has allowed each to state his own case with a striking fairneis, though he seems to have- least tolerance of Herr Battler whom we last see whimpering about the fate of his dog when the end of the world is threatened. Signor Bombardone is made to expound sincerely the, belief that war preserves courage, which he calls the noblest of man's attributes, and General Flanco supports an ingenious case for government by gentlemen as opposed to government by cads. The judge, a model of serenity who is said to be Dutch but has much of the detached logic and integrity to which the author hiniself has arrived, suddenly dismisses the court at the end, and with it the wrangling world it represents. Christianity, Semitism, Communism, Soviet Russia, two rather ineffectual ladies who seem respectively to stand for Camberwell and the Unexpected Isles, and England in the presence of a pig- headed aristocrat—all these have been contributing to the welter of argument, and all these are dismissed with the leaders. We are a hopeless world, and man as a political animal is a total failure. Mr. Shaw, in short, is here seen - and heard washing his hands of us ; and he uses a good disin- fectant soap and the coldest dearest water in doing so. - When this " page of fancied history " is brought to London some of the parts could possibly be more suitably allotted.
But Mr. Donald Wolfit need not alter his present conception of the Judge, and Mr. Ernest Thesiger's Englishman and Mr. Cecil Trouncer's Bombardone must also stay delight- fully as they are. The producer, by the way, would be well advised to transfer Vermeer's " View of Delft," which hangs prominently in the second act's League of Nations Chamber, to the third act's " Salon in the Old Palace of The Hague." Actually, the original hangs in the Mauritshuis a few yards away ! In that act and with that action this picture's heavenly communication of a peace which the world cannot gain would
be far more ironically effective. ALAN DENT.
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