It would have been an easy matter to make cheap fun, as Mark Twain did in A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur, out of the popular view of the Age of Romance, but A. A. M. avoided that obvious lure. Indeed, in his natural anxiety not to be taken too seriously in his first attempt to be serious, he rather tended to make light of his own theory of modern romance, laying a little too much stress at the end on the culinary aspect of conjugal felicity.
I am not sure that Mr. Arthur Wontner (to whom my best wishes for his new managership) quite realised, in his doublet and long hose, my idea of a figure of mediæval romance. In fact I am free to confess that I disagreed with Melisande and preferred him in his golf-clothes. But perhaps that was part of the idea, and Mr. Milne meant me to feel like that. Miss Barbara Hoffe’s Melisande—a difficult part, because she was the only other-worldly person in the play and the only one in desperate earnest—was very cleverly handled. In her most exalted moments of poetic rapture she was never too precious, and when called upon for a touch of corrective humour was quick to respond.
Miss Lottie Venne laid herself out in her inimitable way for a broad interpretation of the visionary’s very earthly mother; indeed once or twice she almost laid herself out of the picture; but she still remained irresistible. As a pair of light-hearted young lovers Miss Dorothy Tetley and Mr. John Williams played really well in parts that were not nearly so easy as they looked. And there was the dry humour of Mr. Bromley-Davenport, as the father (I fear he must have missed the romance of twin souls) and the open-air charm of Mr. Nicholson’s performance as Gentleman Susan, the pedlar. In a word, my grateful compliments embrace as good a cast as ever caught—and held—the spirit of an author.
"Priscilla and the Profligate."
When you have been jilted by Cynthia at the church-door and, two days afterwards, in a fit of pique marry Priscilla at sight (of course you can’t always get a Priscilla to consent to this arrangement; but Mr. Bensley Stuart Gore had a young ward at school who wanted her freedom; so that was all right), you may think to persuade the Faithless One that you have given solid proof of your indifference to her. But you mustn’t dash off to Africa an hour after your wedding with the declared intention of being eaten by wild men or wilder beasts, because, if you do that, you give your scheme away and Cynthia will have the satisfaction of knowing that she has driven you to desperate courses. Yet that is what Mr. Bensley Stuart Gore did (he was the "Profligate" of the title, though he never gave any noticeable sign of profligacy).
After this strain on my credulity I felt prepared for anything, and was not in the least surprised to find him, six years older and still intact, on the terrace of the Hotel Casa Bellini, by the dear old shores of Lake Maggiore, which, as the programme advised me, is in Italy. It seemed, too, the most natural thing in the world that the author, Miss Laura Wildig, should have collected Priscilla and Cynthia (the latter in tow of a third-rate millionaire husband whom she loathed) at the same address.
It was at this juncture that Mr. Bensley Stuart Gore was inspired with a Great Thought. In order to set Priscilla free (I ought to say that he hadn’t recognised her) he would elope with Cynthia. How Priscilla set out to frustrate this noble sacrifice and secure her husband for herself; how she bribed the caretaker to lock him up with her in the "Bloody Turret" of an adjacent ruin; how subsequently, at 2 a.m., in the public lounge of the hotel, she tried to work upon his emotions by appearing in a black night-dress (surely this rather vulgar form of allurement is démodé by now even in the suburbs, or, anyhow, is not so freshly daring as she seemed to think it), I will leave you to imagine. Even Miss Iris Hoey’s nice soft voice and pleasant câlineries could not quite carry off this rather machine-made trifle. If anything saved it, it was the acting of Mr. Frank Denton as Jimmy Forde. Starting as Bensley’s "best man," he missed the wedding ceremony through going to the wrong church, but after that he stuck close to his friend for the remainder of the plot, and greatly endeared himself to the audience by the excellent way in which he played the silly ass.
As for Bensley himself, you might have thought that he had a sufficiently chequered career, yet Mr. Cyril Raymond got very little colour out of the part. For the rest, Mr. H. de Lange, as the millionaire, got a certain amount out of the subject of his wife’s indigestion, which was a sort of leit-motif with him; but most of the colour seemed to have gone into the scenery, admirably designed and painted by Mr. McCleery and Mr. Walter Hann.
O. S.