Page:Punch Vol 148.djvu/590

If one is permitted to judge of a man by the kind of woman he attracts, the character of Lord Milverdale (or Peter, for short) is an interesting enigma. For some reason best known to himself (like most of the obscurities in a play it happened before the curtain rose) he had married a rich and spiteful vulgarian. On the other hand, for his second love he had selected in Janet Grierson a woman of exceptional sweetness and refinement. The domestic complications which followed upon the discovery of this diversion of his affections compelled him to withdraw to America, and it was from there that he wrote to Janet, inviting her (with cable-form enclosed) to join him by the next liner. Naturally one was intrigued about the personality of a man for whose heart there was competition between two such opposite types, and it was very regrettable that a respect for the dramatic unities prevented Mr. Keble Howard from gratifying our curiosity by letting Peter appear on the stage.

In his unavoidable absence, Lady Milverdale relentlessly pursued her husband's lover, and would have been well content to break up the happy home of another couple―Sir Hugh and Lady Brandreth, friends of both parties―if by sowing unwarrantable suspicions against her rival she could have got her revenge. You will gather that our sympathies were not encouraged to take the side of morality, and that the injured woman had no chance with us as against the disturber of her peace. But Mr. Arthur Bourchier would never have lent himself to the defeat of virtue in however repellent a guise, and in the person of Sir Hugh Brandreth, K.C., after using his forensic gifts to dissuade Janet from joining her lover, he succeeds in finding a passable solution of things, though he never exactly readjusts our disordered emotions.

The degeneration of comedy into farce is a frequent subject of critical attack; but here it was the farcical element that revived us. The First Act had gone rather tamely, and in the opening of the Second some of us only listened to Mr. Bourchier's sound homilies on the after-effects of lawless elopement with the respectful toleration due to the accepted generalities of common experience. It was then that the arrival of Lady Milverdale in Brandreth's chambers, hot on the track of Janet, gave opportunities for a game of hide-and-seek, in which, after some diverting acrobacy, the huntress is tracked down by her quarry. And so they play was saved.

It was a charming irony that assigned to Miss Lilian Braithwaite, of all unlikely people, the part of serpent in the original Paradise of the Milverdales. For myself I made no attempt to believe that a wrong thought could ever have found accommodation in her nice head. To hear her urging, with that gentle voice of hers, the desirability of breaking the seventh commandment was to listen to an innocent child pleading for the right play with its favourite toy. The fact―deplorable, if you like―is that Miss Braithwaite was never meant to be anything but her charming self, though within those limits her moods can vary all right, as in the startling change by which she totally forgets her tragedy in the sudden joy of scoring off the other woman. This thankless part was played with sacrificial devotion by Miss Constance Collier, who to the odious qualities of a scandalmonger was asked to add the ridiculous affectation of a woman who had climbed into a world to which she did not belong. Her ignorance of the proprieties went so far that she called at her husband's club for his letters; and the strange thing was that the hall-porter obliged her. At which of Mr. Keble Howard's fashionable clubs is this kind of outrage permitted?

Mr. Bourchier was excellent in the little that he had to do; but it was almost too easy for him. As for Miss Kyrle Bellew, who played Lady Brandreth, her angularity will wear off with time and teaching; but she must try to dress for the part she plays, having no need to advertise her native piquancy. Miss Barbara Gott, as a garrulous housekeeper, kept the First Act alive, and Miss May Whitty, as a mother and an afterthought, was useful in the Third Act, to which her natural ease of manner brought a refreshing air of probability.

The title of the play, The Green Flag, had nothing to do with the Nationalists, and implied no competition with the Union Jack. It was a symbol taken from the railway, and was waved by the K.C. as a caution to Janet.

Mr. Keble Howard has not committed a masterpiece. His titled people smack a little of that Suburbia in which he has specialised. But the play should have a decent run for the sake of the farcical business of the Second Act.

P.S. I regret that in a recent notice of Armageddon I did Mr. Martin Harvey an injustice in attributing to him the unfortunate change in the Scene where Joan of Arc was made to address the English general, and not, as in the original text, the French General. Mr. Stephen Phillips writes to inform me that he himself suggested this alteration during rehearsal.

Surely, you would not let your wife come between us!" says the lovely but naughty Mrs. Chesterton to the infatuated Jim Ponsonby in Mr. Walter Hackett's new farcical comedy. The remark is typical of the