"THE HOUSE OF PERIL."
The maker of a plot that turns upon murder and drugging in the neighbourhood of a Continental gambling haunt must be aware that his work is not going to be brought to the test of common experience, and he is therefore less likely to be hampered by the laws of probability. But there are limits even to the British public's gift of credulity. How far Mrs. BELLOC LOWNDES may have enjoyed special privileges in the search for her material I cannot say; but for myself I confess that a modest acquaintance with the atmosphere of European casinos has left me in absolute ignorance of any such society as that of the hosts of The House of Peril. Perhaps Mrs. LOWNDES'S book (which I have not read) may throw light on this dark mystery; but in the play—and the play's the only thing that concerns us here—I could trace nothing to indicate to my poor intelligence how it was that two decently-bred ladies and their escort, a perfectly honest French officer, ever came to find themselves on terms of easy intercourse with the frowsy old German couple who lived at the Chalet des Muguets, Lacville, on the proceeds of robbery.
| Count Paul de Virieu | MR. OWEN NARES. |
| William Chester | MR. JOHN HOWELL. |
Any obstacle which these repellent Teutons may have had to overcome in the ultimate execution of their nefarious designs must have been the merest child's-play compared with the initial difficulty of inducing the right kind of victim to penetrate so fifth-rate an interior. One never even began to get over the inherent improbability of such an attraction.
And I was the less disposed to take things for granted because of the rather irritating obscurity that veiled the opening of the Second Act, in which we are introduced to The House of Peril and are left for a long time in doubt as to the nature of the place and its relation to anything that has gone before. I think this must have been the fault of the adapter, Mr. VACHELL. He seems to have assumed in his audience a general knowledge of the original story—dangerous confidence, even in the case of so clever and popular a writer as Mrs. BELLOC LOWNDES.
It certainly was his fault that the end of the play was like nothing ever seen off the stage. Let me briefly put the scene before you. A young Englishwoman, paying a farewell call upon the criminals of The House of Peril, has been drugged by them. She wakes up prematurely to find them collecting her pearl necklace—four thousand pounds' worth of it. Murder is in the air, when suddenly, to the surprise of the villains (but not to ours, for we had had fair warning of the dénouement), enter to the rescue two admirers of the lady. In the excitement attendant upon her recovery from a swoon the druggists are suffered to pass out through the door into the arms of a posse of constabulary.
At this juncture, the lady having been restored to her senses, you might suppose that the rescue-party would take at least some fleeting interest in the disposal of their prisoners. There you would be in error. The final curtain is due and there are peremptory affairs of the heart to be wound up before we can get away. So, to clear the ground, one of the admirers makes a gallant statement which redeems the other's character from a false suspicion, and, rightly regarding himself as de trop, goes off by another exit and shows no further concern in either of the two developments—on or off the stage.
The remaining admirer, left alone in the company of the lady, ignores with a fine detachment the impotent rage that his captives are presumably venting in the passage just outside, and declares the ardour of his passion as a man might do in the breathless calm of a moonlit solitude à deux. And on this idyllic scene the curtain descends.
| Wachner | MR. NORMAN MCKINNEL. |
| Madame Wachner | MISS ANNIE SCHLETTER. |
The most satisfying thing in the play was the acting of Miss ANNIE SCHLETTER as "Madame" Wachner of the Chalet des Muguets, an extraordinarily clever study of the doting Hausfrau, much busied about the service of her lord. Mr. NORMAN MCKINNEL as Wachner easily contrived to convey the typically Teuton blend of brutishness, and domestic sentimentality, combined with the heavy playfulness which by a curious delusion, ineradicably racial, is mistaken over there for humour. "Ja, ja," he says complacently, "I have the humour-sense."
It was regrettable that the cosmopolitan Anna Wolsky, acted with great animation by Miss MARGARET HALSTAN, had to withdraw from the scene at an early stage in consequence of being murdered—I don't know how, as we neither saw nor heard the details. Her friend, Sylvia Bailey, however, stayed on to the finish, and Miss EMILY BROOKE saw her nicely through her troubles. A very level performance.
To the rather wooden part of William Chester (foil to hero) Mr. JOHN HOWELL brought a certain unliveliness of his own. A better chance was taken by Miss STELLA RHO, who gave proof of a vivid personality in her brief sketch of a professional fortune-teller who admitted to her clients (this must be very unusual) that she nearly always made a mess of her crystal-gazing.
Finally, Mr. OWEN NARES, looking pretty and not too warlike in the gay uniform of a French Officer of Cavalry, played the hero's part with a very natural and fluent charm. I join in the general hope that this, the first play under his actor-management, will go well. It ought to, for though, in point of power to thrill, it did not quite confirm the promise of its sinister name and theme it was never for a moment dull, and its faults were the kind of stage-faults about which, while they give the critic a chance of being unkind, a British audience never worries too much.
O.S.
A matinée of Romeo and Juliet will be given at the Royal Court Theatre on Sunday, March 30th, at 2.30 P.M., in aid of the Notting Hill Day Nursery, which has done such admirable service among the poor of "The Potteries." Help is greatly needed to enable the promoters of this good work (for which Mr. Punch has before now appealed) to pay off a mortgage and to start a fund for a convalescent cottage-home. Among the cast of the matinée will be Miss MONA MAUGHAN, Mr. DENNIS NEILSON-TERRY and Mr. OTHO STUART, who produces it. Tickets may be obtained from the Hon. Sec., 22, Paulton's Square, Chelsea, S.W.
