AT THE PLAY.
THE ROYALTY TRIPLE BILL.
First a quite charming and, what is not so usual, a quite intelligible fantasy in mime—The Magic Pipe: Pierrot, faithless mistress, despair, sympathetic friend, adoring midinette, and so on. But Mr. JULES DELACRE, who played his own part, Pierrot, with a fine sincerity and a sense of the great tradition in this genre, got his effect across to us with an admirable directness. Miss PHYLLIS PINSON looking charming in a mid-Victorian Latin-Quarterly sort of way (which is a very nice way), danced seriously, fantastically, delightfully, and with quite astonishing command of her technique—the sort of thing that nine infallible managers out of ten who know what the public wants would condemn out of hand as impossible. The intelligent tenth must have been consoled by the enthusiastic applause which greeted the little piece. I have a fancy that mime would go far to restore sanity and tradition to the English stage, and every creditable essay in a delightful art deserves the fullest support.
It is amusing to see our solemn Mr. JOHN GALSWORTHY in labour for three Acts over a rude joke. I frankly confess I enjoyed the joke. Cisterns (its theme) have no terrors for me even in mixed company. But the joke was not the really serious thing about The Foundations, a play that starts (some years hence) with a mob of starving people yelling outside the house—dear, stupid, kindly Lord William Dromondy's house. Lord William was a god of an infantry captain in the great War, and his four footmen—particularly James, the first of them—though revolutionaries at heart, are ready to stand between their master and any other revolutionaries in London town. Well, a bomb is found in the foundations of Lord William's Park Lane palace, and explodes to embarrassed laughter of shocked stall-holders in the Third Act.
The plot's nothing, and the main joke, as I say, nothing to get excited over. But the whole effect of the tremendous trifle, admirably cast as it was, was diverting in the extreme.
Of course it is like our Mr. GALSWORTHY to assume that things will be as black as ever a few years hence. 'Tis, no doubt, what encourages us to keep our end up in the great War. But we know the customs of leopards, and can forgive our pessimist for his creations (for all the world as if he were a milliner) of Poulder, Lord William's butler, rounded pillar of the eternal old order of things; of James, revolutionary but faithful (of course James never would in fact have kept this absurd job); of a light yellow pressman; of a feckless, torrentially eloquent plumber, whose solution of the class war was loving-kindness and the letting of the blood of all who were not kind.
Mr. EADIE was a beloved vagabond of a plumber doing a fine part on his head, as is his way nowadays. But the thing is so good that it is perhaps ungracious to remind him he could make it better. Mr. SIDNEY PAXTON'S triumph with Poulder was his admirable restraint—rarest of accomplishments among comic stage butlers. The effect of everything was heightened by this excellent economy. It was a lesson in artistic reticence. An even more notable feat in the same kind was The Press of Mr. LAWRENCE HANRAY. Obviously he could have collected a good deal more of the laughter of the house if he had played less subtly. I should put it as quite the best piece of playing in a well-played piece. Mr. DAWSON MILWARD has made a deserved reputation as the strong silly ass. He sustained it—with something in hand. Mr. STEPHEN EWART'S James was a quite excellent performance, not very coherent and consistent in conception on the author's part, perhaps, and on that account all the more difficult. Miss ESMÉ HUBBARD gave us pathos skilfully reserved in her clever study of an old, old countrywoman turned trousers-maker; and little DINKA STARACE showed quite astonishing aptitude (or the most wonderful training) in the part of her granddaughter. Miss BABS FARREN also did well with her rather intrusive part of Lord William's daughter.
Box B, by Mr. COSMO GORDON LENNOX, was just a gay trifle to send us home easy-minded to bed. Bobby Stroud, Zepp-strafer, kisses a pretty (oh, ever such a pretty!) widow by mistake. And continues by arrangement. Miss IRIS HOEY was really perfectly irresistible—something ought to be done about it. She would have reduced the whole Flying Corps to dereliction of duty. Mr. FRANK BAYLY had just that air of awkward modesty which is so much more effective than plain swank as an advertisement of gallantry, and Miss MURIEL POPE played a programme-girl with all the skill that an artist thinks is worth putting into little things.
The best evening that I've had in the stalls since the War began ever so long ago.
T.
