Men of the Theatre
No words can completely recapture a past performance; no illustra- tion supply more than a glimpse—and often a disappointing one—of what was once a piece of living theatre. Description, illustration, anecdote, star-spangled background—none of these assets, so dear to the writers of publishers' blurbs, makes a theatrical autobiography worth ading unless the writer himself can command interest. Mr. Peter Daubeny largely succeeds in doing so, and his slight, stylish account of his adventures in management, while hardly making a significant contribution to theatre-history, is amusing and readable.
Imaginative, cultured, witty, Mr. Daubeny seems to have assumed his impresarial role with ease; but it is this very ease, the seemingly tranquil course of his progress into the theatre, which gives his account a certain flatness. Here are no early struggles, no sudden upward thrust from dim beginnings; there is nothing dim about the schoolboy Daubeny who bids Hugh Walpole lunch with him at the Ritz. His brief apprenticeship at the Liverpool Playhouse—marred only, it would seems by boredom and an ill-fitting dickey—was interrupted by the outbreak of war and his voluntary removal to the Guards. Curiously enough, this interruption inspires some of the best writing in the book, particularly the description of a victorious battle in the Western Desert. Here the showman's eye, watching the approach of Rommel 's tanks, discovers the theatrical aspect of warfare.
It is as a showman that young Mr. Daubeny returns to London; and the rest of the book is concerned with his survival as a newcomer to the heady and treacherous heights of West End management. He is a newcomer, but not, apparently, a stranger to this Olympus; his attitude to its gods and goddesses betrays an odd mixture of devotion and shrewd appraisal. Perhaps this very combination of naive, almost schoolboyish enthusiasm with critical detachment marks the natural impresario. It gives the book an uneven quality. There are lapses into Savoy Grill tittle-tattle and theatrical gush about his friends the stars. Yet he can write of Somerset Maugham: "His demeanour was a queer amalgam of chilling sarcasm and pedantic harshness; beneath the metallic rhythm of his conversation I detected a hint of unexpected ribaldry in the close embrace of primness. The eyes carried a look half candid, half veiled, and the finely chiselled face suggested a mandarin who had got little comfort from his experience or his years. . . . I often wonder if he had ever known the happiness which comes from genuine affections, and if Fame has proved a pitifully inadequate substitute."
As the book proceeds one becomes aware of a stiffening of purpose, an increased strength gained through failure and disappointment, which carries him forward to a new kind of success. It is to be hoped that the abrupt ending merely terminates another stage of Mr. Daubeny 's career.
New stars and playwrights have yet to be born under Mr. Daubeny's banner; Mr. Lawrence Langner, author of The Magic Curtain, has attended their arrival by the score.- During the past thirty years the New York Theatre Guild, of which he is a founder, has given the English-speaking theatre more valuable material than any other organisation on either side of the Atlantic. Here Saint Joan first saw the light ; the Lunts became a team; Oklahama was conceived; and under its auspices a school of American dramatists arose. The history of the Theatre Guild is an important chapter in the history of the theatre.
For this reason alone The Magic Curtain should make exciting reading. That it does not altogether succeed in doing so is because Mr. Langner himself is not as interesting as his material. The story ,of the Theatre Guild is only part of what sets out to be the author's life-story, which is told in a leisurely and discursive manner. Mr. Lawrence Langner is obviously a man of exceptional brilliance and energy, and his life, like Mr. Ernest Worthing's, has been crowded with incident. He has known many famous and great people— inventors, artists, writers. Moreover, he appears to have an aston- ishingly detailed memory, which has here supplied him with enough material for two, if not three, books. As it is, he has crammed so much into his 450 pages that the reader, surfeited, can only gasp at the extent of achievement recorded, without being able to share its delights.
The best chapters are those concerned with Eugene O'Neill and Bernard Shaw. O'Neill's letters are extremely interesting, and reveal something of the writer's original mind. But the sections devoted to Shaw are worth all the rest of the book put together. The magnetism of Shaw's personality seems to challenge dullness or digression ; and Mr. Langner himself shows unsuspected qualities when engaged in verbal warfare with the great man. There are some characteristic Shavian letters; that in which he sets forth his views on the dressing and decor of Saint Joan will be preserved, one hopes, for the benefit of future generations. THEA HOLME.
Previous page
