AT THE PLAY.
"The Melting Pot."
It is impossible not to respect the earnestness of Mr. Zangwill when he treats of the persecution of his co-religionists in Russia, or their social exclusion in America. But when he appeals to an English audience he is addressing the converted. It is a good many years since the pogram was a popular form of amusement in this country, and at present the Jew is the flattered idol of English Society. It may seem surprising that his play should have had so great a success in the States, where they are not supposed to have a passion for hearing home truths. But then its main theme is the glorification of America as the Melting Pot or crucible into which are flung the wrongs and hatreds and slaveries of the old world, to re-appear in the shape of justice and love and freedom. This is the theme upon which David Quixano, a Kishineff Jew who has lost all his family in a massacre, goes from time to time into an orgy of lyrical raptures. And indeed the swiftness with which the naturalised immigrant, of just any nationality, assimilates himself to local conditions, instantly changing his heart with his change of sky, and learning to wave his stars and stripes with the best of the native-born, must seem miraculous to the ordinary patriot. And here we touch the weak spot in Mr. Zangwill's pæan of the Melting Pot. For those who migrate to America for the sake of its democratic freedom are the few; and those who go there for the sake of its dollars are the many; and into the Melting Pot—or, to use an image more apposite to indigenous tastes, its Sausage Machine—are thrown not only the wrongs and hatreds of unhappy races but also the dear traditions of birth and blood and family ties and pride of country, to emerge in a uniform pattern without a past.
For his plot, Mr. Zangwill relies upon a very stagy coincidence. Quixano falls in love with a young Russian girl who conducts a Settlement Home in New York, and conquers her prejudice against his race, only to find that she is the daughter of the very officer who permitted the massacre at Kishineff in which Quixano's family had perished, and himself been wounded. In turn he naturally has his own prejudices to conquer, and does so. But not till he has scared us with the fear that he is going to be false to his theory of purification by process of the Melting Pot.
Mr. Walker Whiteside, who plays the part, was excellent in his quiet moods, and when he was obliged to rant was no worse than other ranters. The superb solidity of Mr. Sass as the Russian officer served as an admirable foil to the mercurial methods of Quixano. Miss Phyllis Relph as the heroine mitigated the effect of her obvious sincerity by a bad trick of showing her nice teeth. Mr. Perceval Clark, as a young American millionaire, was pleasantly British. Humorous relief of a cosmopolitan order was provided by the Irish brogue of Miss O'Connor; the broken English of Miss Gillian Scaife; the Anglo-German of Mr. Clifton Alderson who played very well as Herr Pappelmeister (Kapellmeister to a New York orchestra); and what I took to be the Yiddish of Miss Inez Bensusan as the aunt of the hero, a pathetic figure of an old lady with firm views about the keeping of the Jewish Sabbath, and a pedantic habit of celebrating with a false nose and other marks of hilarity the anniversary of the escape of the Chosen People from a Persian pogram twenty-five centuries ago.
It might seem from this long catalogue of humorists that frivolity was the prevailing note of the play. But I can give assurances that this was not so. The prevailing note was a high seriousness, culminating in the last Act, when tedium supervened. I attribute my final depression in part to the scene—a bird's-eye view of New York from the roof-garden of the Settlement House. It was impossible to share Quixano's spasm of exaltation in the matter of the Melting Pot as he gazed on this very indifferent example of scenic art.
"A Midsummer Night's Dream."
I am not sure that Mr. Granville Barker's faithful followers are being quite kindly entreated by him. He happens to have a keen sense of humour and for some little while he has been trying, with a very grave face, to see how much they will swallow. This time, everybody else except the initiated can see the bulge in his cheek where his tongue comes.
The alleged faults of the old school, which the new was to correct, were (1) an over-elaboration of detail in the setting; (2) a realism which challenged reality. ("Challenge," I understand, is the catch-word they use.) Both these qualities were supposed to distract attention from the drama itself. The answer, almost too obvious to be worth stating, is that the grotesque and the eccentric are vastly more distracting than the elaborate; and that, if you only sound the loud symbol loud enough the audience has no ear left at all for the actual words. As for the "challenging" of reality the new school would argue that, as the stage is a thing of convention to start with—artificial light, no natural atmosphere or perspective, no fourth wall, and so on—all the rest should be convention too. The answer, again almost too obvious, is that, since the audience has to bear the strain of unavoidable convention, you should not wantonly add to their worry. And, anyhow, the human figures on your stage (I leave out fairies and superhumans for the moment) are bound to challenge reality by the fact that they are alive. If Mr. Barker wants to be consistent (and he would probably repudiate so Philistine a suggestion) his figures should be marionettes worked by strings; and for words—if you must have words—he might himself read the text from a corner of the top landing of his proscenium.
Hermia (Miss Laura Cowie). "I upon this bank will rest my head."
And the strange thing is that no one in the world has a nicer sense of the beauty of Shakspeare's verse than Mr. Barker. Indeed he protests in his preface: "They (the fairies) must be not too startling.... They mustn't warp your imagination—stepping too boldly between Shakspeare's spirit and yours." (The italics are my own comment.) He is of course free, within limits, to choose his own convention about fairies, because we have never seen them, though some of us say we have. Mr. Chesterton naturally says they can be of any size; Mr. Barker says they can be of any age from little Peaseblossom and his young friends to hoary antiques with moustaches like ram's horns and beards trickling down to their knees. And as many as like it, and are not afraid of being poisoned, may have gilt faces that make them look like Hindoo idols with the miraculous gift of perspiration. But he should please remember that the play is not his own. It is, in point of fact, Shakspeare's, and I am certain he was not properly consulted about the Orientalisation of the fairies out of his Warwickshire woodlands. You will be told that he has been properly consulted; that he himself makes Titania say that Oberon has "come from the furthest steppe of India," and that she too had breathed "the spiced Indian air." But on the same authority Mr. Barker might just as well have fixed on Asia Minor or Greece as their provenance. She charges Oberon with knowing Hippolyta too well, and he accuses her of making Theseus break faith with a number of ladies. Clearly they were a travelling company and would never have confined themselves to the costumes of any particular clime.
Anyhow, when at His Majesty's you saw Oberon in sylvan dress moving lightly through a wood that looked like a wood (and so left your mind free to listen to him), you could believe in all the lovely things he had to say; but when you saw Mr. Barker's Oberon standing stark, like a painted graven image, with yellow cheeks and red eyebrows, up against a symbolic painted cloth, and telling you that he knows a bank where the wild thyme blows, you know quite well that he knows nothing of the kind; and you don't believe a word of it.
But, to leave Shakspeare decently out of the question, I liked the gold dresses of the fairies enormously, so long as Puck—a sort of adult Struwel-Puck that got badly on my nerves—was not there, destroying every colour scheme with his shrieking scarlet suit, which went with nothing except a few vermilion eyebrows. I liked too the grace of their simple chain-dances on the green mound (English dances, you will note, and English tunes—not Indian). But in the last scene, where they interlace among the staring columns, their movements lacked space. Indeed that was the trouble all through; that, and the pitiless light that poured point-blank upon the stage from the 12.6 muzzles protruding from the bulwarks of the dress-circle. There was no distance, no suggestion of the spirit-world, no sense of mystery (except in regard to Mr. Barker's intentions).
The best scene was the haunt of Titania, with its background of Liberty curtains very cleverly disposed. As drapery they were excellent, but as symbols of a forest I found them a little arbitrary. I do not mind a forest being indicated, if you are short of foliage, by a couple of trees (in tubs, if you like) or even a single tree; but somehow—and the fault is probably mine—the spectacle of hanging drapery does not immediately suggest to me the idea of birds' nests. I am afraid I should be just as stupid if Mr. Barker gave me the same convention the other way round, and showed an interior with foliage to indicate window-curtains.
The play itself, with its rather foolish figures from the Court and the easy buffoonery of its peasants, does not offer great chances of acting; and Miss Laura Cowie was the only one in the cast who added to her reputation. Her Hermia was a delightful performance full of charm and piquancy and real intelligence. Miss Lillah McCarthy sacrificed something of her personality to the exigences of a flaxen chevelure. Mr. Holloway's Theseus was wanting in kingliness, and his hunting scene was perhaps the worst thing in the play. He was not greatly helped by his Hippolyta, for Miss Evelyn Hope never began to look like a leader of Amazons. Miss Christine Silver's Titania had a certain domestic sweetness, but even a queen of fairies might be a little more queenly. Mr. Dennis Neilson-Terry as Oberon was a curiously effeminate figure for those who recalled the manly bearing of his mother in the same part. Of the two bemused Athenian lovers, Mr. Swinley, as Lysander, bore himself as bravely as could be expected.
Mr. Nigel Playfair had, of course, no difficulty with the part of Bottom, and Mr. Arthur Whitby's Quince and Mr. Quartermaine's Flute were both excellent. It is to the credit of the whole troupe of rustic players that nobody tried to force the fun.
Apart from a slight tendency to hurry, a trick that, except in swift dialogue or passionate speech, gives the effect of something learnt by heart and not spontaneous, the delivery of the lines—and some of Shakspeare's most exquisite are here—was done soundly.
Finally, no one who wants to keep level with the table-talk of the day should miss this interesting and intriguing production, especially if he hasn't been to Parsifal.
O. S.