CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THE THEATRE
" Castle Anna." By Elizabeth Bowen and John Perry. (Lyric, Hammersmith.)
Ir may be unfair of English audiences to demand that their stage Irishmen shall run true to tradition, but there is no denying that when Mr. Arthur Sinclair, who, as an elderly landlord, has charm and ineffectuality and a disastrous taste for playing the horses, dies off at the end of the first act of Castle Anna we find the surviving inhabitants a bit solemn. Perhaps it is that Castle Anna, the house itself, never succeeds in becoming a genuine place for us. Yet it should be a character in its own right, for it is the house that makes the problem that makes the play. Castle Anna belongs to Richard Castlevance, who has brought home a beautiful English bride. When he dies it passes to his posthumous son, John, who grows up under the competing care of his mother and his aunt, Teresa Castle- vance, whose possessiveness for the home of her childhood is carried to the point of mania. For twenty years these two women live in the house, hating each other. By the time young John comes back from the wars (1920) on the eve of his twenty-first birthday, Teresa seems to have gained for herself a strong winning position. Years before she has persuaded her brother to make a peculiar will by the terms of which the guardianship of John was to pass to her if his mother ever married again, and Teresa knows, with secret pleasure, that this has resulted in a backstairs affair between the widow and Nicholas Bell, son of the neighbouring landowner.
The last two acts of Castle Anna are devoted to discovering how John will deal with the rather surprising state of affairs which he finds at home. But he is such a pleasant young man that there is never much doubt that he will do the right thing, even if only after some hesitation. " You don't expect me to behave like Hamlet, do you ? " he remarks, discussing his mother's remarriage. No, we don't, though it might have made a more interesting second half to the play if he did. Miss Pauline Letts as Teresa Castlevance and Mr. Richard Leech as Nicholas Bell are excellent, and make their twenty-one-years struggle of wills over Castle Anna and its mistress a fascinating contest. And Mr. Arthur Sinclair, as old Barnabas Bell,
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