"The Darling of the Gods."
Though the Gallery, on the night when I attended, received it with rapt interest rather than delirious enthusiasm, The Darling of the Gods promises once more to justify its title. The play has undergone very little modification since it was produced a decade ago. It remains pure melodrama incidentally set in a Japanese dress, and sprinkled with a few Japanese words. Here and there it may reproduce the Japanese attitude of mind, as distinct from details of custom, but the general spirit of it follows the traditional Anglo-Saxon lines. Anybody who knows no more of Japan than may be gathered from the pages of Lafcadio Hearn will at least have learned that her youth is taught to regard the love-interest of an ordinary English novel as an indecency; and so will recognise the improbability of the romantic element in the play. Still, all that is of little consequence, for there must have been very few who went to His Majesty's to improve their acquaintance with comparative ethnology.
The play has pleasant things for the eye; and one of the best of them was the face of Mr. George Relph as Kara, leader of the Samurai. But there were horrors, too; notably the senile amorousness of Zakkuri and the offensive little figure of It, his shadow—an interpolation in the bill of fare. A properly qualified dwarf I might have welcomed; but this precocious babe with the false moustache and the sham bald crown and the cynical giggle, who ought to have been in the nursery instead of serving his master with liquid stimulants and assisting in all sorts of wickedness, was a peculiarly nauseating object, and got on my nerves far more than the terrors of the torture-chamber. This painful business was done off, and indeed most of the bloody work was carried on out of sight—a curious economy in a play where there was so much talk of lethal tools. It is true that an arrow once flopped on to the stage, but it only brought a note from a friend's hand. Swords, too, were now and then raised to strike, but were always arrested in mid-air. Even in the last stand of the Samurai, where one might reasonably have hoped for some hand-to-hand play, nothing happened except one fatal shot from an unseen musket, and even then the stricken body fell into the wings. If it hadn't been for the throttling of a spy and a touch or two of hara-kiri in the dark of the Bamboo Forest we should have had practically no corpses at all.
Sir Herbert Tree was again the most likely exotic, and played his revolting part with great gusto and a permissible amount of humour. Miss Marie Löhr, whose delicate grace of feature and colouring lost something by her dusky disguise, was sufficiently Japanese in the first scene, and did the right twittering with her feet; but when the virgin light-heartedness of Yo-San was changed to tragic despair she mislaid her Orientalism and reverted to her attractive English self. She brought a true pathos into the scene where she is left out of mind by her lover, to whom, at a pinch, all that is unfair to love was fair in war. I shall never, by the way, quite understand how Kara so far forgot his manners and obligations as to threaten her with death for a betrayal to which he owed his own life and with it the opportunity of killing her. With this reservation, Kara is a brave and noble figure, and Mr. Relph made him look like it.
I was disappointed that Mr. Philip Merivale should have had no better chance than was afforded by the part of a dumb servant for the display of that delightful personality which so shone in his Cassio and his Doughty; but he was quietly admirable in the most thrilling scene of all—outside the Shoji of Yo-San. One missed the fine performance of Miss Hildyard as the outcast Geisha, with its suggestion of Sadi Yakko's manner.
The play was again admirably mounted, and the final scene of reunion in the clouds (reached after an interval where every minute, by Greenwich time, was a hundred years) contrived to escape the banality which commonly attends these transfigurations. I was glad, too, to observe that, in the code of etiquette which prevails in "the first Celestial Heaven," the European habit of osculation is recognised; though it seems that you have to go through a very hell of a time before you get to it.
O. S.
Burglar (holding jewel-case). "Sorry to trouble yer, Mum, but would yer mind helping me choose a present for the Missus? It's her birthday termorrer."