AT THE PLAY.
"MR. TODD'S EXPERIMENT."
A new terror—or else a new attraction—has been added to the British Drama. Mr. Walter Hackett has brought the scent of the cinema across the footlights. When he wants to inform you of certain episodes in the hero's past career, or let you know what he is doing when he is out of sight, he throws the main stage into darkness and lights up a smaller one on which he gives you as many as six little tabloid plays within the play.
Such a scheme has its obvious conveniences for the playwright, and should greatly simplify the difficulties of stage-craft. Those introductory statements which are required to explain the opening conditions and need such adroit handling will no longer be necessary. You just put everybody wise by a series of tableaux parlants. No longer need the author worry about the best way of conveying to his audience the details of any action that takes place off the stage; he just turns on a playlet and there it is. Altogether, with a couple of the unities disposed of, he ought to have a much easier time.
On the other hand he is going to have trouble with his principal stage and put his actors to the inconvenience of playing in a painfully congested area. Thus, in Mr. Todd's Experiment, the permanent scene was the hall of a house, with a large tapestry occupying more than half of the wall. Lurking behind this tapestry was the stage for the tabloids, and the general company had to crowd themselves into the remainder or wander forlornly about in the space in front of the tapestry. The playlets again are almost bound to be just concentrated episodes, probably elemental in theme and certainly elementary in treatment.
The excuses for their interpolation in Mr. Todd's Experiment were not marked by a very great subtlety. There was really none for the first three, which simply relieved Mr. Todd of the tedious recital of the hero's disillusionments in love. The next two were introduced by way of illustrating his alleged gift of clairvoyance; and the last served frankly to fill in the interval while the rest of the company was away at dinner. The general effect of all these desultory little Guignols was perhaps rather cheap, and not very complimentary to the intelligence of those of us who had outgrown a childish penchant for peep-shows.
Willoughby Todd (Mr. Holman Clark). "Be your old true self. Make the women adore you."
Arthur John Carrington (Mr. Owen Nares). "Your advice is good. I will now take off my beard and be Owen Nares once more."
Mr. Todd's Experiment (for I have spoken only of Mr. Hackett's) was to restore a blasé and valetudinarian young man of thirty to a proper state of energy by recalling the memories of his past loves and so reviving in him a desire to stand well in the eyes of the sex. For this purpose he produces (1) a bunch of wood-violets to suggest (through the nose) the environment of his first passion; (2) a specially-tipped brand of cigarettes to revive (through the mouth) the sentiment of his second; and a gramophone record to recover (through the ear) the associations of his third.
So well does he succeed that the hero pulls himself together, shaves off his beard, becomes our Owen Nares again, and sallies forth, habited for conquest, to pay calls on all the three. From all the three he retires disillusioned, having found them as egoistic as himself, and in the end finds solace rather shamelessly, in the love of a devoted slave who might have been his for the taking any time in the last several years.
The matter was pleasant enough, but its interest must, I think, have left us indifferent if it had not been for the diversion afforded by the playlets. While the idea was original, the presentation of it seemed to have a touch of amateurishness, though I would not go so far as to agree with the old fogey, played by Mr. Fred Kerr, who pronounced the scheme to be "all Tommy rot." With the exception of one character—the devoted slave—the lightness of the dialogue, mildly cynical, was due not so much to its wit as to the absence of ponderable stuff. The easy trick, so popular with the modern playwright, of letting the audience down in the middle of a serious situation was illustrated by the hero when, being in deadly earnest, he tells every woman in turn that she is the only woman he has ever loved.
As Mr. Todd, Mr. Holman Clark was as fresh as he always is; but Mr. Owen Nares could hardly hope to satisfy the exigent demands of adoration in the part of young Carrington. Who, indeed, could sustain his reputation as a figure of romance when addressed as "Arthur-John"? Mr. Fred Kerr, who played Martin Carrington, the cantankerous uncle, cannot help being workmanlike; but he was asked to repeat himself too much. The best performance was that of Miss Marion Lorne, in the part of the hero's one devout lover, Fancy Phipps; her quiet sense of humour, salted with a slight American tang, kept the whole play together.
O.S.
"Tea for Three."
Playwright Mr. Roi Cooper-Megrue, and principal players Miss Fay Compton, the wife; Mr. Stanley Logan, the friend, and Mr. A.E. Matthews, the husband, made a first-rate thing of two-thirds of Tea for Three.
The wife is without blemish physically or morally. The husband is faithful with a single-minded fidelity in thought, word and deed that looks (and, I am assured by equally innocent victims, is) positively deadly. The friend "frits and flutters" about in a distinctly casual, not to say polygamous, mood, but has one sacred place in his untidy heart in which the wife is enshrined. He can manage to sustain life so long as he may come to triangular tea on Thursdays. But the faithful husband puts his foot on that.
Hence the stolen lunch for two with which the play opens. Philosophy there is, and very good philosophy too, from the flutterer and fritter, and such love-making as every virtuous woman (at heart a minx) allows. She is sorry, doubtless, for the suffering she causes, but (this is my gloss, not, I think, the author's) is really enjoying it like anything and taking jolly good care to look her best. Then follow little lies and as little and as needless and quite innocent indiscretions; and the jealous husband on the rampage.
All this excellently put together, seasoned with wisdom and wit and most capably played; Miss Fay Compton, admirable example of a pretty actress who won't let herself be captured by stage tricks, making everything explicable except her continued love for her intolerable bore (and Turk) of a husband; Mr. A.E. Matthews handling a desperately unsympathetic part, which was already beginning to look impossible, with great adroitness; and Mr. Stanley Logan, though badly hampered by a shocking cold and fighting a coughing audience, carrying the bulk of the good talk and lifting it gently over the few difficult places with a brilliant and well-concealed art.
Thus till towards the end of the Second Act. Then a bad, a very bad, fairy stuffed into Mr. Megrue's head the idea of the suicide lottery. The infuriated husband, finding his wife in her friend's room at 7 p.m. (frightfully improper hour), sternly offers his bowler (or Derby) hat, in which are two cards. The one marked with a cross is drawn by the flutterer and means that he is for it. He is to kill himself within twenty-four hours.... And all this with perfect seriousness.
You will see how the Third Act of a comedy which had tied itself in this kind of a knot simply could not be played. The author had completely sacrificed plausibility, and it was not uninteresting to see him twisting and turning, hedging and bluffing to save it; and a little uncomfortable to note the conviction oozing away out of the performers.... Queer also that it isn't more generally recognised that to come to the theatre with a loud persistent cough is a form of premeditated robbery with violence.
T.