“The Jury of Fate” is a lurid story told in seven tableaux, and its most obvious disability is that since each tableaux must of necessity be abbreviated, the story can only be told in a spasmodic series of impressions, and the players have but a poor chance of getting a hold of their audience. The theme of the play is undoubtedly a good one, that of the man who at the early end of a misspent career prays of the messenger of Death that he may be allowed to live another life on earth in which he shall atone for his follies and wickedness, and so gain a favourable verdict from “The Jury of Fate.”
This is the first tableau, and the second tableau shows us twenty-five years later René Delorme at his old game again, a voluptuary with a pretty talent for drinking, who loses no time in snatching from a most admirable young worker his affianced bride, the fair Yvonne.
A year later we find René with his wife in the garden of an inn near Paris; he has by this time become a successful playwright, an unfaithful husband, and an industrious drunkard, and after an unfriendly conversation with his wife, he proceeds to inaugurate an intrigue with the mistress of a friend of his, who is unfortunately lunching at the same inn.
This lady appears as a kind of Public Prosecutor of Fate, and openly sets to work to ruin and destroy the too impressionable René, and we are not surprised to find a year later in the dining-room of René’s house that her unkindly influence has materially assisted the fine champagne in making a mess of the promising playwright.
This fourth tableau is perhaps the strongest of all, and it concludes with René, deserted by his friends and his wife, the author of a miserable failure just produced, confronted in his solitude by the ghostly figure of the stranger—Death.
Two years later we find René, at a low café in Paris, urging a mob of his discontented workmen to deeds of anarchy and pillage, and not even the dignified advice of David Martine, the workman of tableau two, and the respected and successful employer of labour in the subsequent tableaux, can save the degenerate from his degeneracy; for upon that self-same night René leads a disorderly attack upon the Martine Bridgeworks, and finding, as needs he must, his wife on the premises, most innocently conversing with Martine, a pistol shot makes him the murderer of his wife, according to the dictum, that “All men kill the thing they love.”
By this time “The Jury of Fate” have agreed upon their verdict, and it only remains for René to lose himself in a wood, accompanied only by a thunderstorm of portentous severity and ominous dread. To him arrives the Stranger with the sword, and, with only an unconvincing plea in mitigation of sentence, René falls prostrate before a very much misplaced crucifix, having done far more harm in his second effort than was the case in his previous conviction.
The part of René is in the very capable hands of Mr. H. B. Irving, and he plays it for all it is worth.
Another piece of fine acting is that of Mr. Matheson Lang, in the double part of Pierre and David Martine.
Miss Lillah McCarthy, whose work at the Court Theatre has given us so much pleasure, is excellent as Therese, the courtesan who causes René so much worry, and the part of the injured and slaughtered wife is well played by Miss Crystal Herne, a recruit from America.