THE THEATRE.
" EVERYMAN " AT THE OLD VIC.
ALAS that honesty compels me to write it ! The Old Vic's Shakespeare Company last week gave a thoroughly amateur performance of that delightful fifteenth-century play, Everyman. When I say amateur I mean it in the bad old sense. The actors all seemed separate units with no sense of co-operation ; no one had taken the trouble to think out the idea of the play, much less its dresses individually or in relation to one another.
I hope that the Old Vic is not going to let itself sink to this level. All sorts of carpers and ill-wishers will say that this is just what was to be expected as soon as it was adequately endowed. All that such cynics said if they saw the performance of Everyman was But let me substantiate my general indictment by particular criticisms. Nothing surely can ever be more completely conventional than an allegorical play. We may be shackled by our sense 'of how real people really behave in some scene of a Surbitonian, or even a king, at lunch or quarrelling with his wife. Here it is natural to hanker after naturalism. But surely nothing can be more unnatural than the thing here to be represented, a dialogue between a man and the skeleton figure of personified Death ? Yet Mr. Rupert Harvey, as Every- man, behaved, as far as he could, completely naturalistic- ally. There was no sense of form or formality in the play.
Except in the case of G_oodes (Mr. D. Hay Petrie), the whole cast behaved as if they were in a London drawing-room, or at best in the vestry of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Quaint is a word which has become oclibus by misapplication, but could not the producer sec that here quaintness was completely in place ? It is out of key to treat Everyman morality or psychology as if it were modern and as if it would be entirely
subscribed to by a modern audience. Though to our ideas it is not quite so much out of perspective as a primitive picture,
it is yet only by a frank recognition that Everyman is of its epoch that we can really get the full charm and even the full poignancy of the play. Peter Dorland's outlook on the world was nail, mediaeval, and like that of a child. But if it had the child's limitations, it had the child's freshness and singleness of heart and innocence. By taking the whole thing literally,
the effect of the performance was to set the more thinking members of the audience questioning the truth of his moral axioms and remedies for sin, the penances and scourges. All this time they should have been enjoying a beautiful, internally coherent, magnificently expressed view of life.
I will not worry the reader with instances of lack of polish in the performance, people standing where they should not,
opportunities not taken up, or even with the extraordinary incompetency of the costumes. This inadequacy, by the way, cannot be condoned because the Old Vic had only so much money to spend on the production. The colour certainly was bad, but though it is troublesome, it is not imPossible to dye your stuffs and, even if that could not have been done, much could have been achieved by the rearrangement and better putting-on of existing garments and draperies.
I hope that the Holy Week performances were an instance of the occasional lapse to which any organization is liable and not the Old Vie's idea of how Everyman should be performed. Further, I hope that the management will believe these strictures to be the blunt comments of a well-wisher, jealous for the fame of a theatre where so many fine, well-considered performances and so many good actors have delighted ILLS. TARN.
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