AT THE PLAY.
"Things we'd like to know."
Almost the last thing that you expect in a starting-price bookie is a strong penchant for poetry. It is true that I have before me, as I write, a Turf Commissioner's telegraphic code which contains some rather picturesque symbols. Thus "amber" is the codeword for £1; "heliotrope" for £20; "rainbow" for "win and 1, 2." Still I do not think it probable that if the author of this code should go bankrupt as a bookie—and this he is never likely to do as far as I am concerned—he would be able to retrieve his fortunes by taking up the profession of a publisher of poetical works. Yet this is just what happened, in Mr. Monckton Hoffe's play, with the firm of Wilberforce Brothers, Turf Commissioners. In the first Act we find them in such straits that they can barely scrape together enough petty cash to satisfy the demands of a Water-Rate Collector, insistent on the door-step. In the next Act, a year later, they are all flourishing like green bay-trees as a firm of Poetry Commissioners trading under the name of The Lotus Publishing Company. This amazing result they have achieved by foisting on the office typewriter—trés gamine—the poetical output of one of their own number, and exploiting her as a prodigy under the auspices of a patron of the arts—one Lord Glandeville. How this Mæcenas, this connoisseur in taste, was ever imposed upon by the masquerading of such incredible types, and how they could have amassed all that wealth by the publication of serious poetry, the most notorious of drugs on the market—these are among the "things" that we should all "like to know" in case our own professions should fail us.
What worried me most was that Mr. Hoffe should have so poor an idea of my intelligence as to suppose it possible to impart an atmosphere of probability to a scheme that was pure farce. Yet that was what he tried to do; he wanted me to believe that I was assisting at a comedy. There was no knockabout business; nobody entered the room with a somersault, tripped over a pin or hung his hat on the scenery. They all behaved as if they were presenting us with what is known as a human document, to be regarded au grand (or, at worst, au petit) sérieux. The fun—and there were some very pleasant touches—was not so much the fun of a huge and preposterous joke, but rather the humour of character or incidental detail. The part of Lord Glandeville, who might have been made the most ridiculous butt of imposture, was treated quite solemnly. Indeed, our sympathies were provoked for a man whose finest instincts had been trifled with; who had been suffered to fall in love with the poet-soul of a girl only to find that she was the tool of a gang of rogues. One of them, Dick Gilder, might tell him that he (Glandeville) was an egoist and that he ought to have fallen in love with the girl's body, as he (Gilder) had done, instead of her supposed soul; but that did not help matters much, or prevent our feeling that this treatment of Glandeville was no matter for laughter. And when I go and see a production of Mr. Hawtrey's I want matter for laughter and nothing else.
The best individual performances were those of Mr. Lyston Lyle—really excellent as a soldier of fortune—and Miss Helen Haye as Lord Glandeville's aunt who lays herself out to defeat the matrimonial designs of the prodigy. Mr. Charles Hawtrey was not perhaps at his very best as Dick Gilder. He wore an air of detachment and indulged his old habit of looking over the heads of his stage-audience. He had too many set speeches and was not always quite sure what word came next. Still his mere presence is always irresistible.
As Lord Glandeville, Mr. Vane Tempest, most admirable of buffoons, must have longed to be allowed to make us laugh, but solemnity was his order of the day and he carried it out like a hero. As for Mr. Wenman, who played the partner that introduced Lord Glandeville to the rest of the "Lotus Publishing Company" (though how that refined nobleman ever made the acquaintance of such a rough diamond is another of the "things we'd like to know"), his face is a gift and he used its mobility to good purpose.
Finally, Miss Dorothy Minto, as Dorothy Gedge, typewriter (with the nom de guerre of Gedage), was a little angular, and the motive of her spasmodic excursions across the stage was not always apparent. But she was extremely funny in her inimitable way when she had a chance of exhibiting the unreasonableness of her selection as a mouthpiece of the Muses. At the end, when she wonders if she could have been happy with Glandeville and knows that she would be happy with Gilder, she showed an extremely pretty vein of sentiment. And here, too, I must heartily compliment the author on a scene which threatened to be commonplace and tedious, but was handled with a most engaging freshness and a very unusual sense of what was just right and enough.
O. S.
