III
The fourth play, Admiral Guinea, has fine qualities, both literary and dramatic; it is the least literary and the most dramatically effective of all the plays. It contains one figure, in Pew, which might have been, as far as one may judge in reading, a hauntingly gruesome object; and, in spite of Stevenson’s own subsequent contempt for this play and for Macaire, shows a greater, if conventional, power of simplification than does any of the other plays. Admiral Guinea, a retired and penitent slaver, refuses his daughter her lover, on the ground that the lover is ungodly. Pew, an old associate of Admiral Guinea, become blind for his sins, and still full of vengeful wickedness, arrives in the neighbourhood, catches the lover drunk, leads him back to Admiral Guinea’s cottage, and tries, with his aid, to rob his old captain of certain riches which he supposes to lie in a brass-bound chest. The young man’s reaction, their discovery by Admiral Guinea, the violent death of the unrepentant Pew follow; whereupon the lovers are suitably blessed by Admiral Guinea.
It has been said, above, that this play shows a greater power of simplification than the others; the action of it is certainly quicker, more obvious, less choked with verbal expressiveness, than is the action of the other plays; and in so far as this is so it would appear that Admiral Guinea is a considerable advance, technically, upon them.
The simplification is, to some considerable extent, effected by a strange poverty of invention, and the play is likest of all to those nondescripts which Stevenson as a little boy must have performed upon his toy stage, with paper figures pushed hither and thither in tin slides upon the boards. In spite of that, Admiral Guinea is the best of the plays because, in a higher degree than its fellows, it is truly actable. We cannot regard the confused cramped episodic Deacon Brodie as theatrically effective. Equally it is impossible, from the standpoint of public performance, to consider as satisfactory either Beau Austin or Macaire. Admiral Guinea, however, even if it belongs to a class of play which is associated in our minds with such titles as “Black-Eyed Susan,” has its action very largely comprised in the material put upon the stage; it has the obvious stage effects of darkness and the dreadful tapping stick of Pew; and it has picturesque struggles, death, wounded and reasserted honour, and, for these plays, a minimum of soliloquy. More it would be impossible to claim for Admiral Guinea without seeing it performed: again we have types roughly “mannered” to serve as persons of the play: but they are types clearly in accordance with tradition, and they preserve their interest fully until they are done with and put away with the footlight-wicks, and the tin slides, and the other paraphernalia of the toy stage—paper figures, a penny plain, and twopence coloured.