AT THE PLAY.
"An Indian Summer."
We plunged into the action quickly enough. A breakfast-gong—a sip of coffee—a bite of toast—and Nigel Parry locks up his morning's love-correspondence; Helen, his wife, breaks open the drawer and peruses the damning letter; Nigel returns and catches her red-handed. After this we took a long breath and lingered over the moral aspect of the situation. Indeed, during the next ten years nothing occurred except the separation of the couple; the reported decease of the other woman (whom we never saw, dead or alive), and the marriage of the boy Parry with an actress bearing the ascetic name of Ursula. We now left the old trail in pursuit of this red herring; and for the rest of the play, up to the last moment, our attention was concentrated on the attitude of the elder heroine to her daughter-in-law, to whom she had taken a profound dislike at sight.
But something had to happen if the author was to bring about a reconciliation of the original pair and so justify the symbolic title of her play. Thinking it out, she seems to have recalled that it is customary in these cases to let an accident occur to some junior member of the family, over whose prostrate body the old ones may kiss again with tears. Accordingly, no sooner had mention been made, quite arbitrarily, of an automatic pistol, alleged to be unloaded, than old stagers knew by instinct that Ursula would shoot herself inadvertently. This occurred with such promptitude that even the author recognised that we should not be satisfied with so ingenuous an episode. Complications had therefore to be devised at all costs. Young Parry must be kept in ignorance of the fact that the episode was due to his stupidity in leaving the weapon loaded. So Ursula invents a story to show that the wound in her thigh was due to a fall downstairs. It is true that blood-poisoning—not amongst the more familiar sequelæ of a fall downstairs—supervened. But the legend served well enough on the stage. Among other effects it increased the irritation of the mother-in-law, who felt that the accident indicated a criminal carelessness in one who was about to make her a grandmother, a condition of things that had been brought home to us in the course of some female conversation flavoured with the most pungent candour. When the truth came out, the proved devotion of the young wife causes an entente between her and her mother-in-law, accompanied—for reasons which I cannot at the moment recall—by a parallel reconciliation between the senior couple. Personally, I felt that the threatened "Indian Summer" was not likely to be much warmer than the ordinary English kind.
Perhaps the most intriguing feature of the play was the author's attitude toward her own sex. Mrs. Horlick frankly took the man's point of view. Never for one moment did she attempt to encourage our sympathy for Helen as a wronged wife. Commonly in plays it is the woman, married to a man she never loved, who claims the liberty of going her own way and getting something out of life. Here it is the man who is the victim of a marriage not of his own making (as far as love was concerned), and the author, through the mouthpiece of the woman's confidante, makes ample excuse for his desire to snatch some happiness from fate.
Chilly Forecast for an "Indian Summer."
Nigel Parry Mr. Allan Aynesworth.
Helen Parry Miss Edyth Goodall.
Unhappily Mrs. Horlick has much to learn in stage mechanism. The motive of her exits when, as constantly, she wanted to leave any given couple alone together, was insufficiently opaque. She began very well and held our interest closely for some time; but long before the end we should have been worn out but for the childlike charm and attractive gamineries of Miss Dorothy Minto as Ursula. Mr. Allan Aynesworth, who acted easily in the rather ambiguous part of Nigel Parry, seemed to share our doubts as to the chances of Mrs. Horlick's achieving popularity at her first attempt, for he confided to us, in a brief first-night oration, that she was engaged on another play which he hoped to secure.
But no one will question the serious promise of her present comedy, and I trust that in any future production she may be assisted by as excellent a cast. For they all played their parts, however trivial in detail, with great sincerity. Miss Goodall was the only disappointment, though the fault was not altogether her own. At first she was very effective, but later her entries came to be a signal for gloom, like those of a skeleton emergent from the family cupboard.
"Prince Igor."
All is fair in Love and War, and the only ethical difficulty arises when they clash. This was the trouble with Vladimir Igorievich, heir of Prince Igor. Father and son had been taken in battle, and were held captive in the camp of the Tartars; but, while Prince Igor felt very keenly his position (though treated as a guest rather than a prisoner and supplied every evening with spectacular entertainments), Vladimir beguiled his enforced leisure by falling in love (heartily reciprocated) with the daughter of his captor, Khan Konchak. An opportunity of escape being offered, Prince Igor seizes it, but Vladimir's dear heart is divided between passion and patriotism, and before he can make up his mind the chance of freedom is gone. A study of the so-called "libretto" showed that this was the only thing in the opera that bore any resemblance to a dramatic situation. Figure, therefore, my chagrin when I discovered that the character of Vladimir Igorievich had been cut clean out of the text of the actual opera. I could much more easily have dispensed with the buffooneries of a couple of obscure players upon the goudok (or prehistoric hurdy-gurdy), who wasted more than enough of such time as could be spared from the intervals.
There was no part of adequate importance for M. Chaliapine, so he doubled the rôles of Galitsky, the swaggering and dissolute brother-in-law that Prince Igor left behind when he went to the wars, and Khan Konchak, most magnanimous of barbarians. Neither character gave scope for the particular subtlety of which (as he proves in Boris Godounov) M. Chaliapine is the sole master among male operatic singers. But to each he brought that gift of the great manner, that ease and splendour of bearing, and those superb qualities of voice which, found together, give him a place apart from his kind.
Of the rest, M. Paul Andreev, as Prince Igor, gave his plaint of captivity with a noble pathos. As for the chorus, it sang with the singleness and intensity of spirit which are only possible to a national chorus in national opera, and which (I hope) are the envy of the cosmopolitans of Covent Garden.
The clou of the evening was the ballet, already well-known, of the Polovtsy warriors, executed with the extreme of fanatic fervour and frenzy. The art of M. Michel Fokine can turn his Russians into Tartars without a scratch of the skin. Borodine's music, taking on a more barbaric quality as the action travelled further East, here touched its climax, and the final scene, where Prince Igor returns home and resumes the embraces of his queen, (a model of fidelity), was of the character of a sedative.
"Daphnis et Chloë."
Those who complained—I speak of the few whose critical faculties had not been paralysed by M. Nijinski—that in L'Après-midi d'un Faune the limitations of plastic Art (necessarily confined to stationary forms) were forced upon an art that primarily deals with motion, will have little of the same fault to find in Daphnis et Chloë. Here there is no fixed or formal posing, if we except the attitude adopted (after a preliminary and irrelevant twiddle) by certain Nymphs to indicate, appropriately enough, their grief over the inanimate form of Daphnis. The dances in which, to the mutual suspicion of the lovers, Chloë was circled by the men and Daphnis by the maidens, were a pure delight. There was one movement, when heads were tossed back and then brought swiftly forward over hollowed breasts and lifted knees that had in it an exquisite fleeting beauty. But memory holds best the grace of the simpler and more elemental movements, the airy swing and poise of feet and limbs in straight flight, linked hands outstretched.
In the pas seul competition M. Adolph Bolm as Darkon did some astonishing feats which made the performance of M. Fokine as Daphnis seem relatively tame and conventional; and if I, instead of Chloë, had been the judge I should have awarded the palm to the former. I am sure that Chloë was prejudiced, though certainly Darkon was a very rude and hirsute shepherd, and had none of Daphnis' pretty ways.
The dancing of the brigands was in excellent contrast with the methods of the pastoral Greeks. I will not, like the programme, distinguish them as "Brigands with Lances," "Brigands with Bows" and "Young Brigands." To me they were all alike very perfect examples of the profession; though I admit that the flight of their spears was not always as deadly as it should have been, and that one of the arrows refused to go off the string and had to be thrown by hand into the wings.
It is not easy at a first performance to take in everything with both eye and ear, and I shall excuse myself from attempting to do justice to M. Ravel's music. But I was free (the curtain being down) to listen to one long orchestral passage which followed the capture of Chloë. It was of the nature of a dirge, and it seemed to me to suggest very cleverly the sorrows of a poultry-yard. I suppose Chloë must have been in the habit of feeding them and they missed her.
I hate to say one word of disparagement about a performance for which I could never be sufficiently grateful. But I agree with a friend of mine who complained to me of the way in which Pan was presented. It was this beneficent god who caused a panic among the brigands and so enabled Chloë to return to her friends, though I don't know why he ever let her be captured, for he was there at the time. Well, I agree that he ought to have been represented by something more satisfactory than a half-length portrait painted on a huge travelling plank of pasteboard, which was pushed about from Arcadia to Scythia (if this was the brigands' address) and back again, appearing in the limelight, when required, like a whisky sky-sign.
O. S.
"Can you lend me a couple o' bob, George? I've just had my pocket picked."