AT THE PLAY.
"Carnival."
Those who imagined that they were to be given a dramatic version of Mr. Compton Mackenzie's romance must have been shocked to find that the entertainment provided at the New Theatre was just a variation, from an Italian source, of the general idea of Pagliacci. But it was the only palpable shock they sustained, for never did a play run a more obvious course from start to finish. When you have for your leading character an actor-manager, who plays the part of Othello, with his wife as Desdemona (how well we know to our cost this conjugal form of nepotism), and discusses in private life the character of the Moor—whether a man would be likely to indulge his jealousy on grounds so inadequate—speaking with the detached air of one who is absolutely confident of his own wife's fidelity, you don't need much intelligence to foresee what the envy of the gods is preparing for him. The remainder is only a matter of detail—what particular excuse, for instance, the lady will find for a diversion, and to what lengths she will go.
Simonetta (Miss Hilda Bayley). "Are you pleased with my fancy dress? It was to be a great surprise."
Count Andrea (Mr. Neilson-Terry). "Nothing surprises me in this play."
In the present case her only excuse was the old one, that she was "treated like a child." Certainly she deserved to be, for her behaviour was of the most wilful and wayward; but she was the mother of a strapping boy, and a woman who is thought old enough to play, in the premier Italian company, the part of Desdemona (with the accent, too, on the second syllable) could hardly justify her complaint that she was regarded as a juvenile.
The choice of the Alfieri Theatre for the scene of the culmination of the domestic drama seemed to touch the extreme of improbability. The actors were not a poor travelling company of mummers, as in Pagliacci, with no decent private accommodation for this kind of thing. The protagonist of Carnival was lodged in a perfectly good Venetian palace, where there was every convenience for having the matter out with his wife and her lover. For the rest the plot was commonplace to the verge of banality.
As Silvio Steno, in his home life, Mr. Matheson Lang was excellently natural, but as Othello his make-up spoilt his nice face and tended to alienate me. As Simonetta (I got very sick of the name) Miss Hilda Bayley had a difficult part, and failed, from no great fault of her own, to attach our sympathies, till in the end she explained her rather inscrutable conduct in a defence which gave us for the first time a sense of sincerity in her character. There was too much play with her Carnival dress of a Bacchante, which, perhaps, was less intriguing than we were given to understand. Mr. Dennis Neilson-Terry has a certain distinction, but he did not make a very perfect military paramour. His intonation seemed to lack control, and he has a curious habit of baring his upper teeth when he is getting ready to make a forcible remark.
As for the scenes, they were alleged to be Venice (where the Doges wedded the sea), but there was no visible sign of water. You called for a gondola, which always sounds better than a taxi, but it never appeared. Perhaps, however, for one has not always been very happy in one's experiences of stage navigation, this was just as well.
O.S.
"Peter Ibbetson."
That incorrigible romanticist, George du Maurier of happy memory, was so transparently sincere as to be disarming. No use telling him "life's not like that." "That's just it," he'd say, and get on with his pleasant illusions. Peter Ibbetson is certainly not tuned to the moods of this decade, but it would be a pity if we all became too sophisticated to enjoy such occasional excursions into the land of almost-grown-up make-believe.
If life doesn't give you what you want, then "cross your legs, put your hands behind your head," go to sleep and live a dream-life of your own devising—that is the theme. The bare essentials of the story are that the beloved Mimsy of Peter's happy childhood becomes the wife of a distinctly unfaithful duke; while Peter finds himself in prison for killing his quite gratuitously wicked uncle, and for forty years reprieved convict and deceived duchess meet in dreams till her death divides and his again unites them.
It is a considerable tribute to both author and adapter (the late John Raphael) that their work should, at the height of the barking season, hold an audience silent and apparently enthralled, in spite of the handicap that, in order to make the story in any degree intelligible, much time had to be given to more or less tedious explanations.
I will not pretend that the motives of the characters were clear or that (for me) the phantasy quite passed the test of being translated from the medium of the written word into that of canvas, gauze and costumed players, with those scufflings of dim figures in the semi-darkness and that furtive and by no means noiseless zeal of scene-shifters; or, again, that I was much attracted by a picture of the life after death, in which opera-going (please cf. Mr. Vale Owen) figured so prominently. Indeed I think that the play would be better if it ended with the death of the dreamers and did not attempt that hazardous last passage.
But certainly there were quite admirable tableaux and some very intelligent individual playing—in contrast with the team-work of (particularly) the First Act, which was ragged and amateurish.
Mr. Basil Rathbone's Peter was an effective study, avoiding Scylla of the commonplace and Charybdis of the mawkish—no mean feat. A young man with a future, I dare hazard; with a gift of clear utterance, and sensibility and a useful figure.
It is a good deal to say that Miss Constance Collier so contrived her Duchess of Towers as to make us understand Peter's worship.
Miss Jessie Bateman's Mrs. Deane seemed to me an exceedingly competent piece of work, and Mr. Gilbert Hare thoroughly enjoyed every mouthful of Colonel Ibbetson's wickedness, and made us share his appreciation. And you couldn't accuse him of over-playing, though he certainly looked too bad to be true.
Mr. William Burchill's little sketch of an old French officer was almost too poignant.
Why the landlord of the Tête Noir was got up to resemble Mr. Will Evans so closely is a deep matter I could not fathom, and, if ever I kill my uncle, may Fate send me a less rhetorical chaplain than Mr. Cyril Sworder!
T.
