CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THEATRE
Carrington, V.C. By Dorothy and Campbell Christie. (West- minster.) THE moral of the tale is that life as a regular officer is hardly worth living if you have a wife of refined taste but lack a private income. So it used to be. So, apparently, it is again. At any rate Mr. and Mrs. Christie put up a convincing demonstration in the docu- mentary manner, using a general court martial as framework and basing'the comedy and the melodrama on characters and incidents which have the authentic W.D. stamp on them. Given the character of Major Carrington, V.C., even the mainspring of the plot has the twang of truth. Carrington is a brave, blunt gunner who can handle men in the old heroic way but lacks subtlety enough to deal properly with a jealous, priggish C.O., or a nagging, hysterical wife, or the maddening (and not unfamiliar) procrastinations of the Paymaster, who owes him £200 but neglects to pay it. When Mrs. Carrington demands £100 for the children's overdue school fees, and threatens to put her head in the gas oven if it is not forthcoming, Carrington decides on the bold, blunt action: he takes the money from the battery's imprest account, having first warned his C.O. of his intention. He is duly arrested, and the play, beginning at this point, carries us all the way through the curiously intimate solemnities of the court martial to the bitter end. A happy conclusion has seldom been so deftly avoided : the play ends, as incidents in life so often end, not in a neat splice but in a tangled bundle of ragged ends.
It is all exceedingly convincing, spoiled only by the condescending humour in which the Other Ranks concerned are lapped, and then by an undeniable sketchiness in the big scene between the two women in the case—when Carrington's neurotic wife, learning that her husband was on a single occasion unfaithful to her with a WRAC officer, decides to withhold evidence which would have saved him from the disgrace of dismissal. But in the end the weight of the court martial scenes—with Alec Clunes striking the true note as the plain man pitting the truth against the Manual of Military Law and the vagaries of personal relations—bears down successfully on the lighter imperfections. The play abounds in excellent individual passages in which Mark Dignam, Arnold Bell, John Garside, Victor Maddern and Lionel Jeffries give admirable displays of military manners, high and low. The women's parts—much less satisfactory in themselves—are commendably played by Jenny Laird and Rachel
Gurney. Charles Hickman is the producer. IAIN HAMILTON.
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