CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THE THEATRE
" The Eagle Has Two Heads." By Jean Cocteau. (Haymarket.)
M. COCTEAU'S play has now come to the Haymarket and should be seen by all those who like either classical drama, romance, poetry, prose, monologues,_ myths or fine acting. The story is of a queen in love with her assassinated husband's ghost, and of her liberation from this funeste idie by a young revolutionary poet. He breaks into her room to assassinate her also, but stays to fall in love and to persuade her to relinquish her ghostly lover for someone more plausible. Believing, however, that idyllic love cannot last forever, and fearing that intrigue, court etiquette and possibly the police who are prowling round the castle will mar its perfection, the poet takes poison, preferring to die at the apex of rapture rather than face a doubtful future. The grief-stricken queen, in a magnificently romantic scene, so taunts him with a simulated indifference that, as is her wish, he stabs her. She confesses her ruse and they die to- gether, reconciled but rather uncomfortably, on the stairs. This is the simple version of the plot, but there is another, infinitely more symbolic, which, at the moment of writing, seems strangely elusive. The Play demands, and gets, an extreme virtuosity from the players, for the speeches are Shakespearian in length ; but, despite Mr. Ronald Duncan's able adaptation, considerably less musical to the ear and not nearly so sensible. Miss Eileen Herlie saves us again and again from wondering what on earth it is all about, and with a sort of passionate dignity sweeps us from poetry to rhetoric and on to musical comedy without causing us more than a momen- tary twinge. She is superb, and whether talking lengthily to herself, as she so often has to do, or exchanging profundities with her poet, or chiding her courtiers, she proves herself to be the mistress of her art. Although in spite of this, or perhaps because of it, she fails to invoke pity, or indeed any emotion deeper than admiration, he would be a dullard who was not stirred by her presence and did not respond to the beauty of her voice. Mr. James Donald's poet must needs be a trifle overshadowed by the vigour and intensity of Miss Herlie's queen, but he too knows what he is about and speaks his lines with such understanding that we are sure, at the time, we can understand them too. And what more can one ask? The decor by Gurschner provides a first-rate setting, producing an atmosphere of other- worldliness that is wholly essential to the play's success.
VIRGINIA GRAHAM.
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