CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THEATRE
Maurice Chevalier. (Hippodrome.)—The Long Mirror. By J. B. Priestley. (Royal Court.) ALL by himself, on a platform over the orchestra pit, his celebrated hat shading his eyes like a halo on the slant, or lying impressively in a pool of its own significance on the piano well to the rear of the cavernous, undecorated stage, Maurice Chevalier finds no trouble at all in keeping.a huge audience hugely amused for a couple of hours. His is a philosophy, he says, of work, love and hope, for which the audience cheerfully reads wine, women and song. But how this most excellent of entertainers thrives upon misunderstanding. Is he to blame if people choose to discern dark depths below the sunny surface of a phrase and plunge in headlong, shrieking for joy ? For himself, he stands amazed and then amused at such antics. He disclaims responsibility, but his detachment radiates, like his halo of straw, an infinite tolerance and charm. Knowing, he understands ; understanding, he forgives. He is kindly, this elderly philosopher.
With a brisk and slightly rolling gait, a navigator of the boulevards and pilot of the places, he strides on from the wings for each number, which he prefaces with a commentary in conversational prose. A fragment of mime completes the illumination of the subject, and the vacancy of the stage fills up with the queer (or even deplorable) characters which he summons from the shadows. After this, the song itself : gentle, meek and mild as often as not, and sung in that voice which is not the most distinguished in the world, but breathed into the individual ear so agreeably, so irresistibly. Or almost always so. As an eclectic philosopher M. Chevalier may claim the right to dabble where he pleases, but it must reluctantly be said that the existentialist bebop of St. Germain des Pres fairly eludes him in its more mystical aspects. As well it might.
Mr. Priestley asks much of his audience here. The scene is a cosy hotel in North Wales, where a girl awaits her soul-mate—that is to say, awaits a young composer whom she has never met but with whom she has enjoyed a constant, one-way telepathic communi- cation for some years. While still at sea on the way home from South Africa, she sees and hears him in a vision saying that he is going to a certain hotel in North Wald to attempt a reconciliation with his wife. (What a place to choose for a reconciliation with anyone !) Well, we are asked to accept this, and we may. What is much more difficult to swallow is that the composer, confronted with this intense person whom he has never seen in his life, should not run a mile in a minute to escape her. Which goes to show that it is no good relying on actuality alone for your plot, for Mr. Priestley assures us in a note on the play that " the fact is, however, that although the setting and the characters of this drama are imaginary, its theme . . . was not imaginary but was taken from life, one of the two persons concerned being very well known to me. Nor did I heighten the real story, but, if anything, tended to modify some of its more fantastic features." _ Recalling the scene in which the girl presses the telepathic button and draws the ,composer back to her through the streaming night as though on an elastic string, one thinks that Mr. Priestley might well have done some more modifying. On the night when 1 saw the play Miss Jean Forbes-, Robertson was indisposed, and her understudy, Miss June Brown, took on the long and ludicrously difficult part most commendably. Mr. E. Eynon Evans, Miss Mary Jerrold, Mr. Raymond Young and Miss Heather Stannard are the others who wrestle with the super- natural situation. Mr. Andre Van Gyseghem is the producer. LAIN HAMILTON.
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