AT THE PLAY.
"ANTHONY IN WONDERLAND."
It was not till about the middle of the play, and after a narcotic had been administered to him, that Anthony got there; but we were in Wonderland almost from the start, without the aid of drugs. For we were asked to believe that Mr. CHARLES HAWTREY was a visionary, amorous of an ideal which no earthly woman could realise for him. Occasionally he had caught a glimpse of it in the creations of Art—at the Tate Gallery or Madame TUSSAUD'S or the cinema; but in Bond Street never.
And the pity of it was that he had come in for a fortune of seven hundred thousand pounds odd, which would pass elsewhere unless he married by a given date. It was therefore the clear duty of his relatives—a couple of sisters and their husbands—to find a wife for him. After vainly trying him with every pretty woman of their acquaintance they had resort, in desperation, to the black art of a certain Mr. Mortimer John (U.S.A.), an infallible inventor of stunts, who made a rapid diagnosis of the case and at once pronounced himself confident of success.
Briefly—for it is a long and elaborate story—his scheme is to choose a charming girl, and make a film drama round her. Anthony, with family, is taken to see the show and occupies the best box in the Prince of Wales's Theatre, from which, after a little critical comment upon us in the audience, he falls in love with the heroine. It is the typical film of lurid life on a Californian ranch, and might almost have been modelled on one of Mr. Punch's cinema burlesques. There are the familiar scenes of a plot to hang the girl's lover, swiftly alternating with scenes of her progress on horseback through the primeval forest, and concluding with her arrival just in time to shoot the villain and untie the noose that encircles her lover's carotid.
On the return of the party from the cinema, Mortimer John describes to Anthony the powers of a drug which induces the most vivid of dreams. He, John, had once been in Anthony's pitiful case, and through the services of this drug had achieved his quest of the ideal woman. Anthony, greatly intrigued, consents to swallow a sample of the potion. It is a simple narcotic, and under its influence he is conveyed, in a state of coma and a suitable change of apparel, into the heart of Surrey, where at sunrise he is restored to animation and has the scenes of the evening's drama re-enacted before his eyes, as originally filmed for exhibition. Under the impression that this is merely the vivid dream that he had been promised, he himself takes part in the living drama, playing the noble rôle of an exceptionally white man. In the course of it he exchanges pledges of eternal love with Aloney the heroine. Finally, in a spasm of heroic self-sacrifice, he takes poison with the alleged purpose of saving the heroine's life. We never quite gather how his suicide should serve this end, but then the whole atmosphere is charged with that obscurity which is the very breath of the film-drama.
AN IDYLL OF MOVIE-LAND.
Anthony Silvertree MR. CHARLES HAWTREY.
Aloney MISS WINIFRED BARNES.