AT THE PLAY.
"Daddalums."
This is a play about a Northampton shoe-manufacturer of Scottish nationality. There is, of course, nothing quite like leather, and I can well believe that the lucrative properties of the boot trade (notwithstanding its alleged association with atheistic principles) must at one time or other have attracted this prehensile race; yet I doubt if Northampton, home of the cobbling industry, ever encouraged a Scot to penetrate its preserves. Mr. Louis Anspacher, who wrote the play, may have some inside knowledge denied to me, though his name does not vividly indicate a Scots origin; but it is certain, if his Wallace Craigie really came from over the border, that he was no true Scot, for his dialect showed obvious traces of Sassenach pollution.
I have a mind that moves slowly and I hate to be hustled at the opening of a play. I hate an author to plunge me into a whirl of movement and a medley of characters as if he assumed that I was intimate with circumstances known only to himself and his cast. I want to be told, very quietly, where I am, and if he does not tell me I become peevish. But, even if I hadn't been put off at the start, I don't think my sympathies would ever have been very deeply engaged. I soon saw that, whatever happened to anybody, I should easily bear up. Mr. Louis Calvert did all that was humanly possible to correct my indifference, but his Daddalums (as you might gather from such a name) was not one of those heroic figures whose struggles against the perversity of fate are apt to melt even the cold hearts of the gods (Olympian). This old cobbler, suddenly grown rich, whose one ambition was to make his son "Tammas" a gentleman (as he understood the term), at any cost to the boy's soul, was asking for trouble from the beginning. And when he got it I was far less sorry for the old fool than I was pleased at the chances which this turn of fortune gave to the versatility of Mr. Calvert.
But the interest of the play lies not so much in the plot—worked out mechanically, with one or two saving touches of ingenuity, to a conventional conclusion—as in the character of this lovable old boot-maker, whose single aim in life was to give his son the best that money could buy. His heart, I think, began by being fairly large, but got contracted through specialising in this passion. Snobbery is alien to his nature, but he becomes a snob for Tammas's sake. Stubborn and domineering with others, he is as putty in the boy's hands. He has no use for his other child—a girl. She, like himself, must be sacrificed if it suits the young gentleman—as it did.
I won't say that any very nice psychological subtlety was needed for the portrayal of a character whose ruling motive was so clearly advertised, but it had its lights and shadows, responsive to changing conditions, and Mr. Calvert was quick to seize them all.
The boy's part was too unsympathetic to be played easily. But he had one saving virtue; he never practised his snobbery on the old man who encouraged it. He still called him "Daddalums," and that, I take it, was what the papers would call an "acid test" of his piety. As his fortunes declined Mr. Lister rose to the occasion. The tighter the corner the better he coped with it.
Mr. Hendrie's Fergus McLarnie, whose people must have migrated to Northampton from the neighbourhood of Thrums, was an admirable crony; but he insisted too much and too deliberately on a Scottish accent that made for obscurity. In a broader vein Miss Agnes Thomas played the part of Ellen, the Maid (another Scot), with a humour which even an Englishman (like myself) found no difficulty in appreciating. Miss Edyth Olive, as the hero's neglected daughter, acted with a very nice self-repression, which was all that could be expected of her rather colourless part.
The first-night audience was very warm in its appreciation. Yet I must doubt whether a play that is chiefly concerned with the highly-developed paternity of a boot-manufacturer will make a very poignant appeal to the sentiment of the public.
For one thing they may find the love-interest too sketchy. Of the boy's two fiancées one was impossible, and the other (Rose) just a perfunctory phantom that flitted vaguely from time to time across the stage. She must have known it was a play of father and son, where girls didn't really count. Poor Rose, so unassertive! How modestly she kept herself in the background in that last scene where Tammas, having "dreed his weird" (as they would say in Northampton) and redeemed his past, comes back from Canada, flings himself into his father's arms, remains there listening to a sustained exposition of parental loyalty, and only after a considerable interval remarks the presence of his future wife. She took it very well, but if I know anything of the British public it won't be so easily pleased.
O. S.
SCOTS WHA HAVER.
Wallace Craigie . . . . . . Mr. Louis Calvert.
Fergus McLarnie . . . . . . Mr. Ernest Hendrie.
A Matinée in aid of the Housing Association for Officers' Families, of which the Queen is a Patron, will be held at the Winter Garden Theatre on Thursday, June 24th, at 2.30 P.M. The programme includes a Mime play, for which Mr. Eugéne Goossens will conduct Mr. Arthur Clarke Jervoise's music. Mrs. Christopher Lowther, who appears in the play, is also arranging "An Elizabeth Episode," in which the Stuart-Wilson Sextette will sing.
"Wanted, Lad, about 14 or 15, for telephone. Good wages; good opportunity to learn confectionery."—Local Paper.
We often wondered how these telephonists occupy their time.
"Shop Window Wanted within stone's throw of Brook Street and Bond Street."
Daily Paper.
With so many Bolshevists about we think the advertiser should have used a less provocative phrase.
Tommy. "That's the sort of dog I'm havin'."
Nurse. "Tommy, you're forgetting the 'g' again."
Tommy. "Gee! That's the sort of dog I'm havin'."