Page:Punch Vol 148.djvu/328

Nobody would think of looking for intelligible motives or sequence of design in an ordinary Revue. Bu when Sir James Barrie writes one it's a different thing. He may deviate into fantastic episodes, but we suspect an ordered meaning in his main design and if we fail to find it we feel that the fault must lie with ourselves.

This was our trouble from the very start of Rosy Rapture. There was, in the first scene, a wardrobe, obviously full of portent, whose secretive purpose gave to the play a note of obscurity from which I never wholly recovered. Though this was not a bedroom scene, the wardrobe was hung with female garments, and, from it emerged, now and again, a husband in lieu of the regulation lover. After suffering a good deal of mental strain I reached the rather intelligent conclusion that we were supposed to be ridiculing the tendency of the modern stage to substitute the drama of clothes for that of intrigue. I recalled that in Kings and Queens, which was then still running at the St. James's, much stress was laid upon the young wife's passion for Parisian gowns, while the interest she took in her lover was merely casual and abortive.

It is not for me to question the cleverness of this solution, but it was wrong. I have since been credibly informed that the author was harking back allusively to certain plays of the past, not of great importance and long forgotten, in which a wardrobe was a prominent feature. But not even his ingenuous explanations offered at the close of the first scene lifted for us the veil of mystery that shrouded the motive of this piece of furniture. Nor was this obscurity relieved by the lighting of the auditorium, which was kept in darkness without intermission during the entire performance. In a mood of devotion I can persuade myself to support this arrangement when I assist at a Wagner rite; but the atmosphere of a Revue is seldom really religious.

It would have been more satisfactory if the author, in what was partly a burlesque of the legitimate stage, and partly a sort of Revue of Revues, had simply given us a succession of inconsequent scenes, and not attempted to weave his detached episodes into a connected scheme. Perhaps the best of them was a scene between a Flemish peasant girl (I call her Flemish by way of compromise, for she spoke French and looked Dutch) and a Tommy (American in the humorous person of Mr. Norworth), who had rescued her from the violent attentions of a Bosch. Excellent fun was made of their limited means of communication; but the chaff of Lord Kitchener's advice to soldiers about their relations with women was, for those of us who remembered the whole of it, of rather doubtful propriety. A most delightful feature of the Sixth Scene (and I am glad to hear that it is to be extended) was a freak-film of an automobile perambulator, the work of that clever artist Mr. Lancelot Speed, author of the popular "Bully Boy" series. The scene of the Supper Club of the Receding Chins (where "one chin excludes") was a sound burlesque upon a certain phase of the modern Revue. Indeed, this imitation of vulgar banality was so close that the Pit mistook it for the real thing and were loud in their approval.

But the chief attraction of the play, both for a bewildered audience and, I suspect, for Sir James Barrie himself, was the bizarre collaboration between Miss Gaby Deslys and the author of The Little Minister. Her best friends could scarcely have been disappointed if she failed to impart any very noticeable refinement into the proceedings, but many must have been surprised to discover how well and with what in energy she could act. All the same, it would surely have been easy to find an actress who could have spoken the part at least as cleverly through the medium of an all-British accent. But perhaps it was just part of the scheme of burlesque that the two principal roles in an English Revue should be played by foreigners. However, the native element was admirably represented by Mr. Eric Lewis as a butler on terms of marked intimacy with his employers; by Mr. Leon Quartermaine as a villain with an awkward strain of hereditary virtue; and by Miss Gertrude Lang as a singer whose efforts were always being obliterated by the intervention of a fatuous Beauty Chorus.

Much of what may seem uncomplimentary in this first-night criticism will have lost its point by the time it appears in print. As is the way with Revues, there has, I hear, been a drastic overhauling of the original, and I anticipate many changes for the better.

But no change could add to the charm of Sir James Barrie's one-Act play, The New Word, which precedes his Revue. Here the author is at his very best (and not too sentimental) self; and Mr. O. B. Clarence as the middle-aged father, never on easy terms with his son, but now recognising a new relationship created by the War in which the boy is to play a part, gave a very fine performance; and Miss Helen Haye, as the mother, found, for once, a chance of showing her gentler gifts. I look forward to a still greater pleasure when I can read this delightful play in my private chair, and leave to my imagination those pauses and embarrassments which, when they occur on the stage―and they are of the essence of this dialogue between father and son―are apt to find a painful response in my own sympathetic nerves. O. S.

Extract from a Lenten Card:―

"The preachers on Sunday mornings will have messages of great help and comfort to you, and at the Evening Services, except next Sunday when Mr. ——— will preach."

Here down the main street come hundreds more of those fresh, keen-faced boys who will be with you at the Front soon. 'Left―left―left―left―by the right―wheel! ' Not so bad after a few weeks' drilling, eh?"

Motor Cycling.

Not so bad, perhaps, for the men, but pretty bad for their officers.