STAGE AND SCREEN
" The Dark Tower." By George S. Kaufman and Alexander Woollcott. At the Shaftesbury
THE experienced theatre-goer who finds a suit of armour playing a part in the interior decoration of the stage knows that he is in for one of two things : either his sides will be expected to ache, or his flesh to creep. There is no middle course. The Dark Tower, as it happens, is an essay in the horrific.
It is an unsuccessful essay chiefly because the element of suspense is absent. The authors have conceived a prepos- terous situation, involving a number of consistently improb- able characters and liquidated in a highly fantastic way ; but they did not thereby jeopardize their chances of success. In a thriller it is not the things that happen, nor the people they happen to, that count ; it is the things which the audience has good reason to suppose are shortly going to happen.
Suspense is everything. It may be said of the characters in this type of drama that as long as most of them are bipeds and one of them is beautiful the audience is satisfied ; they need be no more elaborately invested with humanity than A, B and C, who in the algebra books of our childhood dis- played in so many fields of endeavour an equable and tireless rivalry. The merest puppets will do. As long as the threats to their physical, moral, and material welfare are sufficiently cogent and continuous, they will claim our attention and our sympathy ; the most confirmed misogynist will discover an interest in the dullest woman if she is about to be publicly sawn in half.
For confirmation of this theory, look at Ten Minute Alibi, which, with a set of characters no more nearly human than a troupe of sea lions, has in a year enchanted audiences from Liverpool to Liberia.
The authors of The Dark Tower have all the ingredients of excitement to hand, but use them sparingly ; we may be intrigued, but we are never concerned, about what is going to happen next. The thriller does not thrill.
Stanley Vance is a bad man. He orders silk shirts by the dozen and keeps two lethargic white mice for purposes unspecified. His untimely reappearance from what was thought to be the grave throws his wife (a famous actress making her come-back at Kew) out of her histrionic stride, for Vance is a Svengali with the impresario left out ; he hypnotizes his wife into somnambulism rather than celebrity.
We itch to rid the world of such a monster. So does his wife's brother. So does her manager. So does the mysterious Mr. Sarnoff, a visitor to London whose extravagantly foreign appearance could be explained only by the World Economic Conference or by the fact that he was somebody else in disguise. And, sure enough, the ineffable Vance does in time succumb to half a pint of poison and four inches of cold steel. The identity of his assassin must remain a secret.
The play is neither produced nor acted as well as it might be. Mr. Francis L. Sullivan is too negative a monster, suavely suggesting the repellent but failing to achieve the formidable. Miss Edna Best, in a thankless part, is rather monotonous in misfortune ; both producer and authors should have made her less dazed and more daunted. Mr. Edgar Norfolk's performance as her chivalrous manager has not enough edge to it.
On the other hand, Mr. Basil Sydney is forcefully sardonic as the actress's brother, nor does M. Anton Stengel deserve less praise in the guttural and enigmatic part of Sarnoff. Miss Winifred Oughton discovers in the old house-keeper a " character," though she cannot discard the inverted commas, and Miss Martita Hunt gives immense point to an else irrelevant aunt.
The performance of the white mice, it seemed to me, erred on the side of under-acting.
PETER FLEMING.
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