"Wedding Bells."
I begin to suspect that the possible situations of marital farce are becoming exhausted. Certainly we have lost the power of being staggered by the emergence of an old wife out of the past. But Mr. Salisbury Field, who wrote Wedding Bells for America, is not content with a single repetition of this ancient device; he must needs give us these intrusions in triplicate, showing how they affect the career of (1) the hero, (2) his man-servant, (3) a poet-friend. True he only produces two old wives; but one of them, being a bigamist, was able to intrude "in two places" (as the auctioneers say).
The wife of Reginald Carter (Mr. Owen Nares), having first run right away from him and then apparently divorced him for desertion (I told you the play was American), turns up on the eve of his marriage to another. He has barely recovered from his failure to keep his future wife in ignorance of his past when he has to start taxing his brains all over again in order to keep his past wife in ignorance of his future.
The First Act went well enough and was full of good words—not very subtle perhaps, but the kind that invites intelligent laughter. Later the play degenerated into something too improbable for comedy and not boisterous enough for pure farce. The two most disintegrating elements were furnished by a love-sick poet (a figure that should have been vieux jeu in the last century) and an English maid who could never have existed outside the imagination of an American. I make no complaint of the fact that in a chequered past she had married both Carter's man-servant and the antiquated poet; but I do complain that her Cockney accent was imperfectly consistent both with her rustic origin an apple-cheeked lass, we were told, from somewhere in Kent) and her situation as maid to a very smart American.
You will naturally ask what Mr. Owen Nares was doing in this galley; and I cannot tell you. I can only say that he was very brave about it all. In a sense it was a serious performance, the only one of its kind in the play; yet not serious enough to serve as a foil for the general frivolity, for he was constantly bringing his own high sentiments into ridicule, and so burlesquing the Owen Nares that we love to take seriously.
On the other hand, Miss Gladys Cooper, as Rosalie, his late wife, was untroubled by high sentiment; she was content to be wayward and unseizable, confident in the obvious power of her charm to retrieve him from the very altar-rails. Her own heart never seemed to come into the question, and her motive in setting herself to recover him was not much clearer than her reason for deserting him.
Some of the minor characters gave good entertainment. There was a dude (is that what they call them now in America?) who dressed very perfectly and said a great many funny things all well within the range of his own, and our, intelligence. Mr. Deverell played the part with admirable restraint. And we could ill have spared the humours of Carter's man Jackson (Mr. Will West), whose wide experience in matrimony, resulting in an attitude alternately timorous and prehensile towards female society in the servants' hall, was the source of many poignant generalisations. Miss Edith Evans, as a mother-in-law manquée, showed a touch of real artistry; and Mr. George Carr had no difficulty in getting fun out of the part of a Japanese house-boy, almost the only novelty which we owed to the American origin of the play.
When Carter was turned down by a clergyman who refused to perform the marriage rites for a divorced man, there was something very attractive (to a golfer) in his protest against these "local rules." This was one of many good things said; but the play had its dull times too, and there were one or two lapses made in the pursuit of the easy laugh. For instance:—
Carter. "Do you believe in God?"
Wills. "Good God!" (laughter).
[Carter here kneels down to get something from under the sofa.
Wills. "Are you going to pray?" (laughter).
Personality, of course, counts for much, and both Miss Gladys Cooper and Mr. Owen Nares have enough admirers to ensure a success for this rather moderate farce. But not a triumph, I fear; for, after all, the play counts for something too and, though all the Faithful may be trusted to put in one appearance, I doubt if many outside the ranks of the Very Faithful will turn again at the sound of these Wedding Bells.