O.S.
"Peter Ibbetson."
That incorrigible romanticist, George du Maurier of happy memory, was so transparently sincere as to be disarming. No use telling him "life's not like that." "That's just it," he'd say, and get on with his pleasant illusions. Peter Ibbetson is certainly not tuned to the moods of this decade, but it would be a pity if we all became too sophisticated to enjoy such occasional excursions into the land of almost-grown-up make-believe.
If life doesn't give you what you want, then "cross your legs, put your hands behind your head," go to sleep and live a dream-life of your own devising—that is the theme. The bare essentials of the story are that the beloved Mimsy of Peter's happy childhood becomes the wife of a distinctly unfaithful duke; while Peter finds himself in prison for killing his quite gratuitously wicked uncle, and for forty years reprieved convict and deceived duchess meet in dreams till her death divides and his again unites them.
It is a considerable tribute to both author and adapter (the late John Raphael) that their work should, at the height of the barking season, hold an audience silent and apparently enthralled, in spite of the handicap that, in order to make the story in any degree intelligible, much time had to be given to more or less tedious explanations.
I will not pretend that the motives of the characters were clear or that (for me) the phantasy quite passed the test of being translated from the medium of the written word into that of canvas, gauze and costumed players, with those scufflings of dim figures in the semi-darkness and that furtive and by no means noiseless zeal of scene-shifters; or, again, that I was much attracted by a picture of the life after death, in which opera-going (please cf. Mr. Vale Owen) figured so prominently. Indeed I think that the play would be better if it ended with the death of the dreamers and did not attempt that hazardous last passage.
But certainly there were quite admirable tableaux and some very intelligent individual playing—in contrast with the team-work of (particularly) the First Act, which was ragged and amateurish.
Mr. Basil Rathbone's Peter was an effective study, avoiding Scylla of the commonplace and Charybdis of the mawkish—no mean feat. A young man with a future, I dare hazard; with a gift of clear utterance, and sensibility and a useful figure.
It is a good deal to say that Miss Constance Collier so contrived her Duchess of Towers as to make us understand Peter's worship.