WHERE TO FIND A FRIEND

The Examiner.

November 26, 1815.

A new Comedy, entitled Where to find a Friend, and said to be from the pen of a Mr. Leigh, has been brought out at Drury-Lane Theatre. The Dramatis Personæ are as follows:

General Torrington	Mr. Bartley.
Sir Harry Moreden	Mr. Wallack.
Heartly	Mr. Dowton.
Young Bustle	Mr. Knight.
Barney	Mr. Johnstone.
Tim	Mr. Oxberry.
Lady Moreden	Mrs. Davison.
Maria	Miss Kelly.
Mrs. Bustle	Mrs. Sparks.

The story is not easily told, for it is a story almost destitute of events. Sir Harry Moreden has been for some years married to an heiress, a woman of exemplary principles and amiable feelings; but who, as it appears, through no other misconduct than a little playful gaiety of manner, has so far provoked the capricious and irritable temper of her husband, that he writes off to General Torrington, her guardian, gravely proposing a separation. This letter brings the General down from London, in order to learn from the Baronet his real cause of quarrel with his wife; and a singular conversation ensues, in which, to every conjecture of the General’s as to the nature of Lady M.’s offences, the unaccountable husband answers in the negative, leaving it to the discernment of her guardian to find out the actual source of his disquietude. This, it appears, in the course of the play, is a certain fashionable levity and sportiveness of manner, with which it is rather extraordinary that Sir Harry should be displeased, as another objection on which he sometimes dwells is the rusticity of his wife’s taste, in not having any inclination for the dissipation and frivolities of a town life. Some improbable scenes are however introduced to explain the merits of this matrimonial question, in which the studied levity on one side is contrasted with the unconscious violence on the other, until at length Lady Moreden, hearing from her guardian that her husband is much embarrassed in his circumstances, and almost on the point of ruin, reproaches herself with her thoughtless habit of tormenting him; and prevails upon the General to concur with her in applying her own large fortune, left to her separately by her father’s will, to the relief of her husband’s distresses: at the moment when Sir Harry is complaining of his not knowing ‘where to find a friend,’ all his applications to those whom he had considered such having proved unsuccessful, her guardian introduces his wife to him, which produces the reconciliation between them, and gives rise to the title of the play.

In the progress and developement of this story there is very little to interest or surprise: the sentimental part of the comedy is founded on the story of Heartly, whose daughter Maria has run away from him, and been privately married to a man of fashion, but who having, for family reasons, enjoined secresy upon her in his absence abroad, subjects her, in her father’s eyes, to the supposed disgrace of a criminal connection. Old Heartly retires into the country in a melancholy state of mind, and Maria, finding herself unexpectedly near to his cottage, determines to throw herself upon his forgiveness, prevails upon an honest old servant to admit her to his presence, supplicates for pardon, and is again received into his affections. This reconciliation is not well brought about. Her seeking the interview with her father through the connivance of a servant, after the repeated rejection of every application to his tenderness, and when she has an advocate in General Torrington, an old friend of Heartly’s, who has undertaken to bring about a reconciliation, is not exceedingly probable. After her clandestine introduction by the servant, the reconciliation is first effected between Heartly and Maria, on the supposition of her guilt, and is afterwards acted as it were twice over, when the sight of a ring on her finger leads to the discovery of her innocence. The comedy opens with the arrival of Maria at a country inn, near Moreden-hall, kept by the widow Bustle. The introductory scene between this veteran lady of the old school, and her son Jack Bustle, who is infected with the modern cant of humanity, and is besides very indecorous in his manners, is tediously long. Maria’s depositing the hundred pounds in the hands of Mrs. Bustle is a gratuitous improbability; and it is with some difficulty that the notes are retrieved for the use of the right owner by the busy interference of Mr. Jack Bustle and the generosity of Mr. Barney O’Mulchesen, an honest Irishman, who at the beginning of the play is the ostler, but at the end of it, as he himself informs us, becomes ‘the mistress of the Black Lion.’

Johnstone gave great spirit, and an appearance of cordial good humour, to this last character. He has a great deal of ‘the milk of human kindness’ in all his acting. There is a rich genial suavity of manner, a laughing confidence, a fine oily impudence about him, which must operate as a saving grace to any character he is concerned in, and would make it difficult to hiss him off the stage. In any other hands we think Mr. Barney O’Mulchesen would have stood some chance of being damned. Oxberry’s Tim was excellent: in those kind of loose dangling characters, in which the limbs do not seem to hang to the body nor the body to the mind, in which he has to display meanness and poverty of spirit together with a natural love of good fellowship and good cheer, there is nobody equal to Oxberry. His scene with Dowton, his master, who comes home, and finds him just returning from the fair, from the passionateness of the master and the meekness of the man, had a very comic effect. This was the best scene in the play, and the only one in it, which struck us as containing any thing like originality in the conception of humour and character. Of Mrs. Davison’s Lady Moreden, we cannot speak favourably, if we are to speak what we think. Her acting is said to have much playfulness about it; if so, it is horse-play.

A singularity in the construction of the scenes of this comedy is, that they are nearly an uninterrupted series of tête-à-têtes: the personages of the drama regularly come on in couples, and the two persons go off the stage to make room for two others to come on, just like the procession to Noah’s Ark. Perhaps this principle might be improved upon, by making an entire play of nothing but soliloquies.

Covent-Garden.

Cymon, an opera, by Garrick, was brought out on Monday. It is not very interesting, either in itself or the music. Mr. Duruset played Cymon very naturally, though the compliment is, perhaps, somewhat equivocal. Miss Stephens looked very prettily in Sylvia; but the songs had not any great effect: ‘Sweet Passion of Love’ was the best of them.

‘It is silly sooth, and dallies with the innocence of love.’

Mrs. Liston, who played a little old woman, was encored in the burlesque song, ‘Now I am seventy-two.’ Mr. Liston’s Justice Dorus is a rich treat: his face is certainly a prodigious invention in physiognomy.