Page:Punch Vol 148.djvu/410

A first-night audience, largely made up of distinguished actors and actresses, gave a friendly reception to Mr. J. Hartley Manners' new play at the St. James's Theatre. The author calls it "a comedy of age," but it might be more fitly styled "the tragedy of an auburn wig." Sir Richard Gauntlett, widower, after a married life wrecked by the faithlessness of his wife, recovers hope, and imagines that he has recovered youth, in the smiles of a charming widow, Mrs. Gordon-Trent. So he dons the wig and a pair of stays two sizes too small for him, and blossoms forth as an Adonis of twenty-five, much to the disgust of his friends and contemporaries, Gladwin, retired soldier, and Carstairs, ex-diplomatist. They are possibly more disgusted by the dithyrambs on the joys of youth which Sir George Alexander has to deliver. Felicia, too, Sir Richard's convent-bred daughter, who worships the memory of her mother, is horrified at the thought of her father marrying again. She is a in love with Geoffrey Annandale, whose mother has also kicked over the matrimonial traces—a secret which he imparts first to his fiancée and next to her papa. Then in walks Mrs. Gordon-Trent, and she, as you will have guessed, is Geoffrey's peccant mother.

In the Third Act Felicia makes an impassioned appeal to her father not to marry the sinful lady, and stings him into the revelation that her own mother had not been a saint either. But the excitement, or the pressure of those stays, is too much for a weak heart, and he collapses on the sofa. Both engagements are now off.

In the last Act Gladwin and Carstairs, dyed and corseted to match their old friend's whim, arrive at Gauntlett Abbey, to find him recovering, but minus the auburn wig, the trim figure and the illusions of youth. After them comes Mrs. Gordon-Trent, determined to reunite Felicia to her Geoffrey, and incidentally Sir Richard to herself. As no one could resist Miss Nina Boucicault she has her way.

The play, it will be gathered, is of the stage stagey, but the acting was excellent—notably that of Mr. Alfred Bishop and Mr. Nigel Playfair as the elderly friends; of Miss Madge Titheradge as Felicia, and of Mr. Owen Nares as Geoffrey. When the speeches have been judiciously pruned and the action tightened up, The Panorama of Youth should make a pleasant enough entertainment. But we respectfully suggest that if the auburn wig were made a shade less luxuriant and the stay-laces slightly relaxed, Sir George Alexander's part would gain in probability. L.

There is very little excuse for a Revue unless it makes you laugh, and Mr. Macdonald Hastings' production in this kind at the Kingsway is not nearly as funny as he could have made it, for he has the true gift of humour. I call it a Revue—though it was not advertised as such—because it reproduces and combines nearly all the popular features of recent plays. There is the Young Man who is Not on Good Terms with his Reputed Father (Searchlights); the Jew of Commerce (Potash and Perlmutter); the American Get-rich-quick Method (passim), and the Gallant Young Second Lieutenant (everywhere). All these features are represented in Advertisement; and I might, if I were in a captious mood (which is far from my thought) throw in the Rehearsal for the Accolade, which recalls The Twelve Pound Look. In detail Mr. Hastings follows most closely the lines of Searchlights. There the Reputed Father hates the Son; here the Son hates the Reputed Father; in each you have the Mother's peculiar devotion to her Son, and her confession of her relations with the Lover, now dead; in each the damning proof is provided by a portrait which appears to be the Son's but is really the Actual Father's.

But the play is not without signs of originality. Thus, the hero was never once shown in khaki on the stage. This novelty, however, is mitigated by the appearance of a rather subordinate character in uniform of this material with red collar-tags. He steps straight out of a newspaper office into a Staff appointment. Another sign of the creative faculty was to be seen in the character of the Jew father, Luke Sufan. Starting life as a struggling musical genius, he developed commercial tastes, devoting himself to the exploitation of Sufan's Staminal Syrup ("you pay a dime and drink a dollar"), which brought him a fortune and even the menace of a knighthood. It also acted as a little rift within the violin, which ultimately made the music mute and killed the man's soul. This is certainly a new touch. Men have often sacrificed other arts for lust of lucre, hut there has never come within my knowledge any previous case of a man's sacrificing the art of music for the profits of a patent medicine.

The Christian wife, who had married him in early days for joy of his violin, was soon driven by his brutality into the protective arms of an old lover, from whom she returns home in time to bear her husband a son that isn't his. Sufan takes a high paternal pride in him, educating him above his sphere, and receiving open contempt in return. The curtain rises upon the boy's twenty-first birthday, which is celebrated by a dinner-party given to the advertising clique who have helped to boom the Syrup, the father's object being to bring home to his son the humble origin of his exalted prospects. The boy admits to his mother his instinctive disgust at his father's tastes, and she responds by admitting the hereditary cause of this unfilial attitude.

In the next Act, the sudden news of the boy's death in the War, arriving in the midst of a commercial séance, throws Sufan into a paroxysm of grief; but the ruling passion is strong upon