Mr. Pinero rising, phœnix-like, from the ashes of “The Wife without a Smile,” has, according to many intelligent playgoers, soared to a greater height than ever before, and people have not hesitated to declare “His House in Order” to be a finer play than “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray.”
A few years ago Mr. Pinero was reported to have said, upon some public occasion, that what a dramatist requires is praise. Our leading playwright ought just now to be like the little boy in the advertisement, “He is happy now he has got it.”
With everybody loud in their praises of the play, we have to ask for sympathy in the disappointment we suffered on seeing it. We have always been full of admiration for Mr. Pinero’s genius, and having been told to expect so much of his latest work, we were discontented with what we saw and heard. To begin with, we could not find in the play one single character with whom we could sympathise or whose cause we could espouse with any enthusiasm.
Nina is presumably meant to appeal to the sympathies of the audience, but, after all, her only claim to this appears to be that she is mortified and distressed by the brutality of the relatives of the first wife of her husband. Nina Jesson seems to be just a middle-class little thing who, entering the Jesson household as governess, marries Jesson on the death of his first wife.
She is devoted to ill-mannered dogs, which she would love to encourage about the house; she is a confirmed cigarette-smoker, having been instructed in this accomplishment by her father, the clergyman, and she appears to be untidy, unpunctual, and generally impossible; whilst she is sneak enough to read other people’s letters and to use them for her own ends. And so to keep Jesson’s house in order, the deceased wife’s sister acts as hostess instead of the unpractical Nina—and that is the grievance. She and the other three members of the Ridgeley family do not hesitate to enlarge on the shortcomings of the second Mrs. Jesson, and hence our tears are invoked on behalf of the ex-governess.
We may say, however, that for Miss Irene Vanbrugh, who plays Nina, we have nothing but the warmest admiration. She plays the part for all that it is worth, and her performance is the finest feature of the play.
The members of the Ridgeley family are, to our mind, like nothing in the world except themselves, and they certainly are so much like one another that Nina might have drawn them at any time by saying: “There are not four Ridgeleys but one Ridgeley.”
Mr. Pinero has probably met a Ridgeley somewhere, but we hope there are not many of them about. Hillary Jesson, in one of his flights of declamation, denounces the Ridgeleys as “individually and collectively one of the pests of humanity,” and this line got the most hearty applause of the evening. Obviously the Ridgeleys never go in front at the St. James’s Theatre, and it is not at all a bad device of stage-craft to direct all your slings and arrows against a class of people who, if not absolutely non-existent, are certainly never to be found amongst the audience in a theatre. The middle-class Puritanical goody-goody must always be a safe butt for the player and playgoer.
But there are much worse people than the Ridgeleys in the play. There is a Major Maurewarde who seduces the wife of his friend, sneakingly claims the only offspring of that marriage as his own natural son, and after the death of the lady contrives to enjoy the hospitality of the cuckold and the affection of the bastard—a nice specimen of an officer and a gentleman!
Then there is a British Minister to some foreign republic, unfortunately home on leave, who must have a finger in every pie and put the whole world straight. He espouses the cause of Nina, but when she is going to use the compromising letters of her predecessor in the affections of Jesson, Hillary Jesson, his brother, the meddler, prevails upon her to do no such thing, but to hand over the compromising documents to his safe keeping, with the result that he loses little time in handing them himself to his brother, the deceived husband.