"Tea for Three."
Playwright Mr. Roi Cooper-Megrue, and principal players Miss Fay Compton, the wife; Mr. Stanley Logan, the friend, and Mr. A.E. Matthews, the husband, made a first-rate thing of two-thirds of Tea for Three.
The wife is without blemish physically or morally. The husband is faithful with a single-minded fidelity in thought, word and deed that looks (and, I am assured by equally innocent victims, is) positively deadly. The friend "frits and flutters" about in a distinctly casual, not to say polygamous, mood, but has one sacred place in his untidy heart in which the wife is enshrined. He can manage to sustain life so long as he may come to triangular tea on Thursdays. But the faithful husband puts his foot on that.
Hence the stolen lunch for two with which the play opens. Philosophy there is, and very good philosophy too, from the flutterer and fritter, and such love-making as every virtuous woman (at heart a minx) allows. She is sorry, doubtless, for the suffering she causes, but (this is my gloss, not, I think, the author's) is really enjoying it like anything and taking jolly good care to look her best. Then follow little lies and as little and as needless and quite innocent indiscretions; and the jealous husband on the rampage.
All this excellently put together, seasoned with wisdom and wit and most capably played; Miss Fay Compton, admirable example of a pretty actress who won't let herself be captured by stage tricks, making everything explicable except her continued love for her intolerable bore (and Turk) of a husband; Mr. A.E. Matthews handling a desperately unsympathetic part, which was already beginning to look impossible, with great adroitness; and Mr. Stanley Logan, though badly hampered by a shocking cold and fighting a coughing audience, carrying the bulk of the good talk and lifting it gently over the few difficult places with a brilliant and well-concealed art.
Thus till towards the end of the Second Act. Then a bad, a very bad, fairy stuffed into Mr. Megrue's head the idea of the suicide lottery. The infuriated husband, finding his wife in her friend's room at 7 p.m. (frightfully improper hour), sternly offers his bowler (or Derby) hat, in which are two cards. The one marked with a cross is drawn by the flutterer and means that he is for it. He is to kill himself within twenty-four hours.... And all this with perfect seriousness.
You will see how the Third Act of a comedy which had tied itself in this kind of a knot simply could not be played. The author had completely sacrificed plausibility, and it was not uninteresting to see him twisting and turning, hedging and bluffing to save it; and a little uncomfortable to note the conviction oozing away out of the performers.... Queer also that it isn't more generally recognised that to come to the theatre with a loud persistent cough is a form of premeditated robbery with violence.
T.