AT THE PLAY.
"The Barton Mystery."
One of the most difficult feats of juggling is, I understand, the deft tossing up and catching of a heavy weight (say a dumb-bell), a very light weight, such as a champagne cork, together with any old thing of irregular shape, a bedroom candlestick, for instance. Mr. Walter Hackett's The Barton Mystery is a most ingenious turn of this sort.
The fiancé of the sister of the wife of Richard Standish, M.P., is under sentence of death for the murder of Mr. Barton. He happens to be innocent, though he admits at the trial that he quarrelled violently with and even threatened Barton on the night of the murder, and his revolver has been found by the dead man's side. That vindictive relict, Mrs. Barton, is holding back some material evidence which could save the condemned man, or so Standish thinks, and she is adamant. Now Barton was unquestionably a bad egg, but the widow doesn't want the whole world to know it—at least not till she finds the woman. Some woman, who had incidentally written some, shall we say, very impetuous love letters, is being shielded. Who is she? Is it Standish's wife, for instance? Ah!... This is the dumb-bell.
A Lady Marshall, the wife of a Sir Everard Marshall, a comic scientist in perpetual flight from his overwhelming spouse, is one of the sort that finds a new religion every few months and is now in the first fast furious throes of her latest, which is some form of psychomania, whereof the high priest is one Beverley, a plausible ringletted charlatan of alcoholic tendencies (Sludge the Medium, without his cringe and snarl), who ekes out his spasmodic visitations of genuine psychic illumination with the most shameless spoof. This is the cork.
The candlestick is the dream motif, always a ticklish business to handle, and in this particular case—well, no, I won't be such a spoil-sport as to go into that, for the chief pleasure of this kind of an entertainment is the succession of pleasant unexpected shocks which are deftly administered to the audience by the author.
There were times indeed when the latter nearly dropped his dumb-bell—times when it was in imminent peril of barging into the cork; and most certainly the candlestick very nearly slipped out of his hand. But it just didn't, so you will see that it was really a most exceptional piece of jugglery. Of course I will admit you have to swallow the robust assumption that into a household over which the shadow of death in its ugliest form hovers so threateningly two fatuous people, to wit the scientist and his wife, can come and babble about their own trivial domestic troubles or their latest philosophy of life. But then mystery plays always are like that, and this is a jolly good one of its kind—a kind which it pains me, as a superior person, to confess that I liked enormously.
THE MEDIUM AND THE PALMIST.
Beverley ... Mr. H. B. Irving.
Sir Everard Marshall ... Mr. Holman Clark.
Mr. H. B. Irving as the preposterous Beverley was in his very best form. Beverley is really a creation. How much the author's and how much the player's it would be an impertinence to inquire. This imperturbable trickster with his thin streak of genuine sensitiveness to psychic influence; his grotesquely florid style—the man certainly has style; his frank reliance on apt alcohol's artful aid; his cadging epicureanism; his keen eye for supplementary data for his inductions and prophecies; his cynical candour when detected, is presented to us with Mr. Irving's rich-flavoured and most whimsical sense of comedy, with all his exuberant abundance of gracious or fantastic gesture and resourceful business. In the trances, sometimes real, sometimes simulated, he gives you a plausible sketch of how a modicum of psychic power (whatever that may be), laced with whisky neat, might colour a séance. Mr. Hackett, by way of showing that he has not ignored the literature of his subject, has adapted from the admirable, but, I regret to say, entirely untrustworthy, because incurably original, Maeterlinck an entirely new definition of psychometry. But we certainly will not go into that.
Mr. Holman Clark as the sceptical Sir Everard, completely spoofed by Beverley in the end, with an elaborate make-up ruthlessly reminding us of our simian ancestry, potters cleverly about the stage with that admirable and amiable craft which he has at such easy command. Miss Marie Illington as Lady Marshall, the seeker after light, kept the burlesquerie of her part skilfully within bounds—indeed this matter of key was extraordinarily well handled by the three players entrusted with what I have ventured to call the cork motif.
As to the more serious business, Mr. H. V. Esmond seemed to behave very much as one would imagine a decent M.P. behaving in such embarrassing circumstances. He suspected his wife with all the ardour which public men on the stage always exhibit. His little turn of desperate tragedy carried conviction—almost too much conviction, as you will find—but I won't explain.
Miss Jessie Winter, as his wife, very adroitly contrived an ambiguous effect of likely guilt but possible innocence. She more than fulfils the promise of her last performance in this theatre, but she must (may I tell her?) arrest the development of "the Fatal Cæsura," that exasperating histrionic device whereby every salient phrase is broken up for no conceivable reason into two halves. In the secondary stages there is but slender hope of a cure; in the tertiary there is none.
Miss Darragh was, as required, the vindictive widow to the life (this kind of life, you understand), and Miss Hilda Bayley played very charmingly the little wilful fiancée who—but no, I must keep my promise.
With much less evidence than the applause and generally keyed-up attitude of the Savoy audience afforded me, I could risk a psychic communication in the authentic manner of a Beverley séance. "All is dark.... It is getting light.... I see a man.... He leans eagerly to a telephone.... He thrusts something into envelopes. He goes on thrusting things into envelopes. The telephone keeps ringing.... It is.... Can it be? Yes, it is a Box Office." An institution which at the Savoy should be busy for many months to come.
T.