AT THE PLAY.
"REMNANT."
I wish now that I had not been compelled to postpone my visit to the Royalty, for I think the fall of Baghdad must have put me a bit above myself. Anyhow, I was less moved than usual by the triumph of virtue and the downing of vice; and permitted myself to wonder how a play like Remnant ever found its way into the Royalty (of all theatres), and what Mr. DENNIS EADIE (of all actors) was doing in this galley, this melted-butter boat. And indeed there were moments when I could see that Mr. EADIE himself shared my wonder, if I rightly interpreted certain signs of indifference and detachment in his performance. I even suspected a sinister intention in the title, though, of course, Messrs. MORTON and NICCODEMI didn't really get their play off in the course of a bargain sale of superannuated goods.
Apart from the Second Act, where Miss MARIE LÖHR (looking rather like a nice Dutch doll) delivered the blunt gaucheries of Remnant with a delightfully stolid naïveté, the design of the play and its simple little devices might almost have been the work of amateurs. The sordid quarrels between Tony and his preposterous mistress (whom I took to be a model, till I found that he was only an artist in steam locomotives) were extraordinarily lacking in subtlety. In all this Bohemian business one looked in vain for a touch of the art of MURGER. What would one not have given for something even distantly reminiscent of the Juliet scene—"et le pigeon chantait toujours"? And it wasn't as if this was supposed to be a sham Americanised quartier of to-day. We were in the true period—under Louis PHILIPPE. Indeed I know no other reason (costumes always excepted) why the scene was the Paris of 1840. For the purposes of the play Tony might just as well have been a British designer of tanks (London, 1916). Nor was there anything even conventionally French about the girl Remnant, who might have been born next-door to Bow Bells.
REMNANT BARGAIN DAY.
Tony ... MR. DENNIS EADIE.
"Remnant" ... MISS MARIE LÖHR.
Miss MARIE LÖHR was the life and soul of the party. Her true comedy manner, when she was serious, was always fascinating. She said with great discretion her little Barriesque piece about the desirability of babies, and she did all she knew to keep the sentiment from being too sickly-sweet. Here she had strong assistance from Mr. EADIE as her lover Tony; for, though he got a fine flash out of the green eye of jealousy when he suspected his patron, Jules, of jumping his love-claim, it was obvious at the end that the success of his professional ambitions was far more to him than any affair of the heart. And, after all, when Remnant complained of a curious bourdonnement in her ears, and Tony had to reply solemnly, "That which you hear is the beating of your heart to the music of your soul," you could hardly expect a man with Mr. EADIE'S sense of humour to throw much conviction into the statement.
Mr. C.M. LOWNE was a very passable beau, and made love to Remnant with that rich fruitiness of voice of which he is a past master. It was her business (as she explained to Tony when he surprised their two faces within kissing distance of each other) to keep Jules in good humour since Tony's chances depended upon his patronage. But it couldn't have helped much to tell Jules with such appalling candour that the shiver produced by his kiss was the same kind as she had once felt when a rat ran over her face during sleep. However, Jules was not a beau for nothing and could afford this exceptional set-back to one of his many amours. There was, by the way, an excellent little comedy scene between him and his wife, played by Miss MURIEL POPE with a quiet humour as piquant as her gown.
As Manon, the querulous termagant that Tony had taken for mistress, Miss HILDA MOORE was not very kindly served by her part—so rudimentary that its highest flight was achieved when, with a Parthian shot, she referred to Tony as a geni-ass.
I will not forecast a limited success for this play, for who would dare to say that there is not always room in the broad British bosom for yet another triumph of sentiment over ideas—I speak of the play itself and not of the performance? If only for Miss LÖHR'S sake I could wish that the best of fortune may attend it; for to have worn her hair as she did in the Second Act, out of regard for the period, was a sacrifice as fine as any that women have shown in the course of Armageddon (if I may judge of them by their portraits in the Photographic Press), and she ought to have her reward, bless her heart! O.S.
"GENERAL POST."
It would be easy to make fun of the exaggerations and ultra-simplifications of Mr. TERRY'S new comedy. It is much pleasanter (and juster) to dwell on its wholesomeness, its easy humour and its effect of honest entertainment. Not a highbrow adventure, it is not to be judged by highbrow standards. It is decently in key, and an exceptionally clever cast carried it adroitly over any rough places. Remarkable, too, as almost the first popular testimonial since the War began to the too-much-taken-for-granted Territorials, who worked in the old days while we scoffed and golfed. That's all to the good.
THE TAILOR WHO DID NOT NEED TO PRESS HIS SUIT.
Sir Dennys Broughton ... MR. NORMAN MCKINNEL.
Lady Broughton ... MISS LILIAN BRAITHWAITE.
Edward Smith (tailor) ... MR. GEORGE TULLY.
Our author's hero is an excellent provincial tailor, who is also keen Captain Smith in the Sheffingham Terriers. As tailor his chief customer, as soldier his contemptuous scandalised critic, is Sir Dennys Broughton, whose wayward flapper daughter Betty is in the early fierce stages of revolt against the stuffiness of life at Grange Court, meets Smith over some boys' club work, and, finding brains and dreams in him (a formidable contrast to her loafing brother), falls into passionate first-love. Smith is just as badly if more soberly hit, and recognising the impossibility of the situation (quite apart from demonstrations by the alarmed Broughtons) decides to take his tape and shears to his London house of business. The date of all this being about the time of the misguided Panther's fateful leap on Agadir.
Act II. brings us to the second year of the War. Young Broughton, puppy no longer, is gloriously in it, and has just been gazetted to a Territorial regiment whose Colonel bears the not uncommon name of Smith. Our tailor, of course, and a rattling fine soldier too. Having discovered this latter fact and also formed a remarkably cordial relationship apparently in a single day, the enthusiastic cub subaltern (distemper and snobbishness over and done with) motors up his C.O., who is visiting his brother and partner, and brings him in to Grange Court on the way. Sir Dennys, now a brassarded private and otherwise a converted man, is still confoundedly embarrassed, and stands anything but easy in the presence of his youngster's Colonel. Lady Broughton, least malleable of the group, is frankly appalled by this new mésalliance. Perhaps Mr. TERRY'S version of blue-blooded insolence and fatuity is for his stage purpose rather crudely coloured, but who shall say that the doctrine that a man in khaki who has been an elementary schoolmaster or a tailor is a man for a' that, is quite universally accepted in the best circles even in this year of grace? Betty, now a grown girl in the cynical stage, revenges herself with feline savagery on the knight of the shears for the imagined slight of his defection.
Act III. is dated 19? just after peace is declared. The tailor is not (as I half expected) back in his shop, but a Brigadier-General Smith, V.C., is being invested with the freedom of Sheffingham and is making a spirited attack on the defences of Betty. She puts up enough of a fight to ensure a good Third Act, and capitulates charmingly to the delight, now, of all the Broughton household—butler included. I hope Mr. TERRY is right and that the places taken in this great war game of General Post and the values registered will have permanence.
I won't deny that the excellent moral of the play goes far to disarm one's critical faculty. Why not confess that one lost one's heart to the nicest tailor since Evan Harrington? Indeed, Mr. TULLY (always, I find, quite admirable in characterisation, and that no mere matter of outward trick, but duly charged with feeling) made just such a decent, lovable, sideless officer as it has been the pride of the nation of shopkeepers to produce in the day of challenge. Whoever was it dared cast Mr. MCKINNEL for the part of a weak kindly old ass of a baronet, without any ruggedness or violence in his composition? Congratulations to the unknown perspicacious hero and to Mr. MCKINNEL! Miss MADGE TITHERADGE flapped prettily as a flapper; bit cleanly and cruelly in her biting mood; surrendered most engagingly. This is less than justice. She used her queer caressing voice and her reserves of emotional power to fine effect. Miss LILIAN BRAITHWAITE made her Lady Broughton nearly credible and less "unsympathetic" than was just. Mr. DANIELL is new to me. He played one of those difficult foil parts with a really nice discretion.
The audience was genuinely pleased. It dragged from the author a becomingly modest acknowledgment. He did owe a great deal to his players, but a writer of stage plays need not be ashamed of that. T.
Ethel (playing at grown-ups). "IS YOUR HUSBAND IN THE WAR, MRS. BROWN?" Mabel. "OH YES, OF COURSE, MRS. SMITH."
Ethel. "IS HE IN FRANCE?" Mabel. "NO, HE'S IN THE WAR LOAN."