The Theatre
"Helen!" : Produced by C. B. Cochran. At the Adelphi. Hden ! Not Oh, Helen ! or Say, Helen ! or anything crude like that. Just Helen ! A short title.
It might have been shorter. " ! would have been enough. At first the exclamation mark may strike you as rather arririste, rather too much in time "Walk up ! " manner. But really it is the clue to the whole produetion. It compels your gasps as would a drawn sword. A title less explosive would have been hypocritical.
"An Opera Bouffe. Based on La Belle I [(Wile by Meilhae and Halevy. Written by A. P. Herbert. Music, by Jacques Offenbach, arranged by E. W. Korngold. Directed by Max Reinhardt. Dances by Leonide Massine. Scenery and Costumes Designed by Oliver Messel . " It reads like a galaxy ; it does not look like a team. Yet the most impressive thing about Helen ! is its unity of atmosphere. The dis- integrating forces of departmentalism are nowhere at work. Mr. Cochran has fused the talents and the material at his disposal into an unplaceable but indivisible whole. The legs of many periods are pulled ; but no bones are broken. Homer's gods and heroes, lifted bodily out of a saga, live on in a conceit. Mr. Cochran knows as wellas the author of Troilus and Cressida: "That all with one consent praise new-born gawds, Though they are made and moulded of things past, And give to dust that is a little gilt
More laud than gilt o'er-dusted."
Here his gawds really are new-born. Helen, for all her complicated and rather contradictory pedigree, is a remarkable work of derivative creation.
Chief credit for this must go to Mr. :Wessel. His costumes and settings are exquisite essays in liaison. From the hat of to-morrow to the chiton of three thousand years ago he has skimmed the centuries without eOtillitittitig himself. His debts are perhaps heaviest in the eighteenth century, but there they are legitimately incurred in the name of pastoral- ism. Besides, we are given no time to analyse or identify. "That's Watteau—that was ! " we gasp, as a tell-tale shepherdess vanishes in the arms of a uniform by Chelsea out of Crete.
The actors are good. Mr. W. H. Berry, as Cakhas, has most of Mr. Herbert's best lines and does them justice. Mr, Hay Petrie appears too briefly as Mercury. Mr. Bruce Carley., as Paris, is a fine figure of a co-respondent, at once formidable and disarming. The dancer Eve convulses herself alarmingly but with grace. Miss Evelyn Laye, if she hardly substantiates Mr. Herbert's contention that Helen "is as real as Cleopatra or Queen Anne, and much more interesting," makes a ilaz,ling mans bell. As Menelaus, a man horn to be second string, Mr. George Robey is heroically self-effacing. He never imperils the delicate balance of the piece by asserting the alien technique of the music hulls; and yet remains, somehow, the most nearly human figure on a fantastic tapestry.
Herr Reinhardt's production is not of the sort that hits you in the eye. It is a craftsman's work, free from the isolating selfishness of art. It is concerned to provide a vehicle for a play, not a triumphal chariot for a reputation. Sonic of the scenes—the orgy, for instance, and the battle— well deserve, if only for the way they are lit, an immortality which the theatre cannot give them. It should be added that these, and many others, owe much to M. Massines direction of the ballet.
Is it churlish to regret that so lavish an entertainment for the ear and the eye left the mind with rather short commons ? Mr. Herbert, an expert in these matters, could so easily have been given more chances of pointing a moral to a tale so richly adorned. The mannered finery of the whole might well have clothed a more explicit satire. Mr. Herbert's favourite allusions to our present discontents occur spasmodically. Might they not have been combined in a more coherent attack on the folly of our age ? Could we not have seen a Helen who was more of a character and less of a clothes-peg ? But satire is a dark horse, and allegory a rank outsider. No doubt Mr. Cochran, who like all connoisseurs is a most judicious punter, knew best. Let us be grateful that he has picked
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