I give little for Mr. Thurston's generalities (his talk of "hysteria," which was never a British foible, showed his lack of elementary observation), but the character of John intrigued me as a fair example of the type of egoist, very common among quite good fellows, who is more concerned to satisfy his own sense of the proper thing to do than to consider in what way, less romantic perhaps, he can best devote to the service of his country the gifts with which nature has endowed him.
The play went very well for the first two Acts. The various members of the Woodhouse family were excellently differentiated. The father (played with admirable humour by Mr. Frederick Ross) bore bravely the shock to his trade, and took a manly but quite ineffectual part in household duties for which he had no calling. His lachrymose wife (Miss Mary Rorke) was a sound example of the worst possible mother of soldiers. John we know, and Mr. Owen Nares knew him too, and very thoroughly. John's wife (I can't think how she came to marry him) had the makings of an Amazon and would gladly have spared her husband for Kitchener's Army at the earliest moment. Her part was played very sincerely and charmingly by Miss Barbara Everest. John's eldest sister regretted the war because she had some nice friends in Germany, but she caught the spirit of menial service from her sisters, of whom the younger was a stage-flapper of the loudest. Finally the second son (Mr. Jack Hobbs) was a nut who began with his heart in his socks but shifted it later into the enemy's trench.
Perhaps the best performance of all—though it had little to do with the war and nothing to do with child-birth—was that of Miss Hannah Jones as Mrs. Pinhouse, a perfect peach of a cook. There were also two characters played off. One was a maid-servant who declined to come to family prayers on the ground of other distractions. I admired her courage. The other was Michael, the precious infant whose entry into the world had occupied so much of our evening. Everybody on the stage had to have a look at him. I felt no such desire. He bored me.
For a play that made pretence to a serious purpose there was far too much time thrown away on mere trivialities. At first the exigencies of the stage demanded compression. The news of the ultimatum to Germany, the mobilisation, the rush to enlist, the attack on Germany's commerce, were all stuffed into the space of a few minutes. But the whole of the Third Act (laid in the kitchen) was wantonly wasted over the thinnest of domestic humour.
There is a light side, thank Heaven, even to war; but Mr. Thurston had a great chance of doing serious good and he has only half used it. I am certain (though he may call me a prig for saying it) that if he had set himself to serve his country's cause through the great influence which the theatre commands, he could have done better work than this; and he ought to have done it.
O. S.
The Ambassadors' Theatre is producing a triple bill which includes a "miniature revue" entitled Odds and Ends. The cost of the production may be gathered from the following note in the preliminary announcement:—
"N.B.—Mr. C. B. Cochran has spared no economy in mounting this Revue."