STAGE AND SCREEN
THE THEATRE
1% hat Say They ? " By James Bridie.—" The Professor
From Peking." By S. I. Hsiung. At the Malvern Festival.
THE Malvern Festival is a kind of testing-time for the dramatic critics, that grave and patient body of men once likened— ‘‘.is it not by Sir Max Beerbohm?—to the Metropolitan Police. These stalwarts, the seniors less dour than usual and the juniors even more jaunty, now walk about the salutary hills with all the appearance of being out of uniform and on holiday. But are they? Each afternoon they must immure themselves to hear in turn a ponderous frolic by Mr. Bridie, the oddest sort of Sino-Victorian melodrama by Mr. Hsiung, and four other plays whose nature at this moment of writing remains to be seen, but whose authors are as various and disparate as Sir Robert Vansittart, Mr. Alexander Knox, Miss Evadne Price and Miss Ruby Miller in collaboration, and Mr. Shaw himself. To make the testing-time the more trying, the first week has begun in scowling weather which makes us wish that the clouds scudding over Malvern's lonely height would thunder and be done with it. To mortify us further, the rain desisted and out popped the celestial sun half an hour before Mr. Hsiung's play was due to begin. And it is shining still.
Normally you say of outrageous things that they have to be seen to be believed. You cannot do so with What Say They? and The Professor From Peking, because both audiences came away refusing to believe that they had seen what they saw. The first has in it things so infelicitous, and the second things so clumsy, that you are kept permanently occupied in alternately rubbing your eyes and shaking your ears.
About half of the blame should go to the management for insisting upon only one producer for the whole programme. Mr. Ayliff is sound and admirable at the job of producing. But it is wicked of the management to insist, or wrong-headed of him if he himself insists, on the attempt to produce six brand-new and totally dissimilar plays on six consecutive nights. There is virtue in a hat-trick only if it is successfully achieved ; and there is no precedent for stating that a double hat-trick of this sort can be achieved by one unaided producer.
The pace of these two plays has been funereally slow, and their casting has been in many parts arbitrary. Figure Miss Yvonne Arnaud, for example, as a charmless and almost Shavian nuisance of a woman who sets a Scottish University to rights by masquerading as the Principal's private secretary and assuring everybody that respectability is a thing to guard against. Picture Mr. Cecil Trouncer as an elaborate Irish poet who hides his light under the bushel of a university janitor's uniform. Envisage the cherubic Mr. Anthony Bushell, making no pretence of being a day older than himself, as a Principal in a country where University Principals are invariably nearer eighty than twenty-five. Conceive if you can Miss Eileen Beldon, in the other play, impersonating one Rainbow Wang, who allures her husband's visitors, gets locked in the bathroom for misbehaving, and is finally smacked for foolishly endeavouring to be diplomatic.
The two acting successes in all this miscasting and im- perfect production have been those won by Mr. Alastair Sim in the former and by Mr. Norman Wooland in both plays. Mr. Sim is a gaunt, lip-licking, seaweed-eyed Clerk of the Senate—a Chadband with the Scottish strength of mind to refuse buttered toast. Mr. Wooland plays two wildly different roles and distinguishes himself in each. He is first a healthy drunken medical student, convincingly Scottish in his in- sincere respect to his seniors. He is then a Chinese Professor, far subtler in his insinuating behaviour than anybody or anything else in the whole of Mr. Hsiung's play. These two finished sketches could only come from an artist who was a first-rate character-actor in the making.
For well-considered reasons, one does not dwell on the two plays themselves in further or more explicit detail. A plain bald summary of either would read like a nonsense rhyme
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