The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/The Theatre (July 1923)
THE THEATRE
BERNARD SHAW'S The Devil's Disciple has been not very interestingly done by the Theatre Guild. But then the play itself is not very interesting—as Shaw goes. I always feel about Mr Basil Sidney—the Dick Dudgeon of the production—that he might conceivably be good in some other rôle than the one I am seeing him in—in this case, perhaps, that of the Minister. It seems to me a great mistake to cast him for these sprightly and dashing parts. For one thing, his delivery is too slow. Earlier in the season, in the Hopkins' Romeo and Juliet, he was the least mercurial Mercutio I have ever seen. He delivered Mercutio's witty jibes in a drawl suggestive of Josh Billings and unloaded the Queen Mab speech painfully like a wagonful of bricks, staggering with one phrase at a time and then heaving up his back for another. And to The Devil's Disciple he brings neither the fire nor the nimble wits of the part. His mind seems actually to move more slowly than that of the stupid people he is supposed to confound.
For the rest, the rôle of the younger brother, whom the text makes nothing worse than thick-witted, is not only perverted into a village idiot part, but is doubly ruined by an actor who has obviously no gift for idiocy, but looks as if he would be far more at home as a brilliant young Member of Parliament in an English drawing-room drama. Mr Roland Young, as General Burgoyne, is intelligent, as always, but seemed to me to be hampered a little by the habitual constraint of his stage presence from representing a character whose easy manners are supposed to contrast with the stiff ones of the army.
You and I by Philip Barry is a partially interesting attempt to deal with an authentic theme and to study an authentic milieu. But it is badly spoiled before the end and I believe for the following reasons. In the first place, Mr Barry takes the inhabitants of his country house for very smart and cultivated people when they are actually half-baked in the extreme. You think he is going to study them seriously, then you discover that he shares their view of themselves—that he is impressed by their suburban luxuries and ravished by their silly-clever wit—a wit which is only one of the means such people employ to make agreeable the banality of their lives—like curtains of flowered chintz and little electric wall-lamps. Furthermore, Mr Barry, having set out with a real problem, proceeds to develop it with theatrical situations. The young girl who loves the boy so much that she is willing to give him up entirely so that instead of being obliged to support her he may follow his architectural dreams, but never offers to share his struggles or to assist him with her $2000 a year! The father who having smothered his own artistic ambitions by a money-making career allows his son to do the same thing just at the moment when he is himself most keenly feeling his own futility, and who after becoming at the end of years one of the mainstays of a large soap company is unable to take a year's vacation without being in danger of losing his job! I don't know whether it was the presence in the cast of Mr Ferdinand Gottschalk, but the whole thing reminded me a little of the late Clyde Fitch. Clyde Fitch was par excellence the virtuoso of the external: like the America of the time, his true gift lay in playing with it. When I think of his plays, I think of people being kept awake by banging radiators, trying to eat wax oranges, turning on the wrong electric lights, of men diving under the table after dinner to retrieve the things the ladies have dropped. I think of beings who speak on ordinary occasions in the very accents of life, but who as soon as they are moved by any strong emotion begin to talk like the theatre of fifty years ago. When Fitch was on the surface he was excellent: he was a master of the property and the "line," but when he was serious he was almost always awful: his situations were wholly for and from the stage.—Mr Barry has a gift not unlike Clyde Fitch's; let him beware, as he hopes to be an artist, how he falls back on the same tricks.
At the Circus you saw beautiful horses and beautiful human beings—which is much. For the rest, I don't mind having dogs and seals and even elephants trained to do tricks, but I do object to sulky lions and tigers badgered into jumping over each other. Lions and tigers, like domestic cats, have no feeling for human games; they cannot enter into the spirit of the thing. Where a seal will dance about on a spring-board and bark eagerly for fish, a tiger has to be driven with a whip and a revolver fired off in its face; they never look anything but bored and morose and anxious to eat the tamer.—I saw also a red-eyed hippopotamus in a cage only twice its length and in which I suppose he had been hauled from Bridgeport to New York and was to be hauled from New York to Cincinnati. He gazed wildly from his meagre bath with the frightened innocence of cows in cattle-trains, and when one of the hands slammed a trunk behind him he started like a nervous woman. I pity this hippopotamus and wish he were back in his native swamp.
Amateurs of the slapstick arts who go in for Joe Cook and Charlie Chaplin, should not fail to see the vaudeville act known as Williams and Wolfus. Herbert Williams is a clown of a high order with a curious fantasy of his own. Obviously a serious and respectable character, he seems doomed to failure and disappointment. When he first comes on there is no spotlight and he has to shout to the electrician; he desires to sing a song, but his voice is not quite strong enough, and when he does get under way his silk hat begins slipping off. Then the orchestra leader turns out to be a malignant demon who, instead of keeping time with the baton, begins twirling it like a drum-major and otherwise behaving like a fiend. Williams finally snatches the stick away from him and bashes him with it over the head, but the baton only bends in two and the demon remains unscathed. There is nothing for the poor gentleman to do but to hand it back politely. As he touchingly confides to the audience in his low inadequate voice: "This is very embarrassing for me!" His adventures have the quality of a bad dream—or of a French Dadaist drama. I suppose it will only be a question of time before someone puts him in a review.