AT THE PLAY.
"An Indian Summer."
We plunged into the action quickly enough. A breakfast-gong—a sip of coffee—a bite of toast—and Nigel Parry locks up his morning's love-correspondence; Helen, his wife, breaks open the drawer and peruses the damning letter; Nigel returns and catches her red-handed. After this we took a long breath and lingered over the moral aspect of the situation. Indeed, during the next ten years nothing occurred except the separation of the couple; the reported decease of the other woman (whom we never saw, dead or alive), and the marriage of the boy Parry with an actress bearing the ascetic name of Ursula. We now left the old trail in pursuit of this red herring; and for the rest of the play, up to the last moment, our attention was concentrated on the attitude of the elder heroine to her daughter-in-law, to whom she had taken a profound dislike at sight.
But something had to happen if the author was to bring about a reconciliation of the original pair and so justify the symbolic title of her play. Thinking it out, she seems to have recalled that it is customary in these cases to let an accident occur to some junior member of the family, over whose prostrate body the old ones may kiss again with tears. Accordingly, no sooner had mention been made, quite arbitrarily, of an automatic pistol, alleged to be unloaded, than old stagers knew by instinct that Ursula would shoot herself inadvertently. This occurred with such promptitude that even the author recognised that we should not be satisfied with so ingenuous an episode. Complications had therefore to be devised at all costs. Young Parry must be kept in ignorance of the fact that the episode was due to his stupidity in leaving the weapon loaded. So Ursula invents a story to show that the wound in her thigh was due to a fall downstairs. It is true that blood-poisoning—not amongst the more familiar sequelæ of a fall downstairs—supervened. But the legend served well enough on the stage. Among other effects it increased the irritation of the mother-in-law, who felt that the accident indicated a criminal carelessness in one who was about to make her a grandmother, a condition of things that had been brought home to us in the course of some female conversation flavoured with the most pungent candour. When the truth came out, the proved devotion of the young wife causes an entente between her and her mother-in-law, accompanied—for reasons which I cannot at the moment recall—by a parallel reconciliation between the senior couple. Personally, I felt that the threatened "Indian Summer" was not likely to be much warmer than the ordinary English kind.
Perhaps the most intriguing feature of the play was the author's attitude toward her own sex. Mrs. Horlick frankly took the man's point of view. Never for one moment did she attempt to encourage our sympathy for Helen as a wronged wife. Commonly in plays it is the woman, married to a man she never loved, who claims the liberty of going her own way and getting something out of life. Here it is the man who is the victim of a marriage not of his own making (as far as love was concerned), and the author, through the mouthpiece of the woman's confidante, makes ample excuse for his desire to snatch some happiness from fate.
Chilly Forecast for an "Indian Summer."
Nigel Parry Mr. Allan Aynesworth.
Helen Parry Miss Edyth Goodall.
Unhappily Mrs. Horlick has much to learn in stage mechanism. The motive of her exits when, as constantly, she wanted to leave any given couple alone together, was insufficiently opaque. She began very well and held our interest closely for some time; but long before the end we should have been worn out but for the childlike charm and attractive gamineries of Miss Dorothy Minto as Ursula. Mr. Allan Aynesworth, who acted easily in the rather ambiguous part of Nigel Parry, seemed to share our doubts as to the chances of Mrs. Horlick's achieving popularity at her first attempt, for he confided to us, in a brief first-night oration, that she was engaged on another play which he hoped to secure.
But no one will question the serious promise of her present comedy, and I trust that in any future production she may be assisted by as excellent a cast. For they all played their parts, however trivial in detail, with great sincerity. Miss Goodall was the only disappointment, though the fault was not altogether her own. At first she was very effective, but later her entries came to be a signal for gloom, like those of a skeleton emergent from the family cupboard.