THE THEATRE
THE HERO AS CONVICT ["ESCAPE." BY JOHN GALSWORTHY. AMBASSADORS THEATRE.]
Ir is difficult to give an account of Mr. GaLsworthy's new play without a preface in praise of Mr. Nicholas Hannen.
So true in feeling, so wisely reticent in expression, is his beautiful performance of Matt Denant, that he lifts the well-told " thriller " out of its atmosphere of melodrama into that of tragedy i weaving its episodes together ; keeping always a middle way, between the pathos that he might have over-emphasized, and the other temptation of insistence upon a " comic relief" that offers itself in one or two incidents of the convict's vain windings over Dartmoor.
For (one conceives) it would be possible to give a too gallant Du Maurier tone to this adventure of a man who fell into the grasp of the law mainly because "his luck was out." That would be to play for sympathy openly ; and Defiant, in Mr. Hannen's interpretation, asks for nothing, but accepts what the wild enemy country gives him, as though, like the cup of tea in the cottage of two Devonshire ladies, it were a thing he doesn't expect or deserve. And when he takes something—for example, the scrap of food and the Ford car from a party of hard-faced tourists—you feel that he is right, too, in abstaining from any film-like side-glances, from any insistence upon the guilty sense of the outlaw. Mr. Hannen neither pleads nor threatens ; and only very gradually does he take on the haunted aspect of a man set alone in a world of pursuers. Slowly, by what you divine behind the assumed control in his face, as the sweat pours down it, as the eyes grow less hopeful and the intolerably imposed habit of search for refuge induces weariness and nervous slips, you see him relinquishing the game. The moment will come when somehow it will not seem worth while—when prison again, under harder conditions of monotony, will seem better than this twisting and turning before the pack in chase. It comes suddenly, absurdly, when the convict cannot allow the nice parson to tell a lie for his sake. But you have felt it coming, as you watch Mr. Harmers, long before. Truly, an admirable performance ! And to praise it is, after all, to praise the play as well.
Why will not people get out of Mr. Galsworthy what, with lapses into epigrammatic preachiness, as in Windows and perhaps The Pigeon, he is nearly always able to give— a dramatic tale swiftly narrated, in little incidents selected for the illustration of social types and conventions ? Why must we always be scenting a moral purpose, as the Dartmoor constables beset Denant ? Here, as so often before, what Mr. Galsworthy does so well—he did it in The Silver Box, in The Skin Game, and in Loyalties—is to give us a panorama of dexterously touched episodes, balanced so as to convey the impression of an impartiality that doesn't, of course, exist in art—in any selection, by one creative mind, out of the mass of possibilities. The thing has to be arranged, the lights thrown here, and not there, after careful deliberation. All that Mr. Galsworthy does, at his best, is to conceal from Bs the hand of the mechanician. But his supposed impartiality has had a curious effect—paradoxically it has made people imagine him always to have an axe to grind, and a sermon up his sleeve. They take him for the convinced Judge who begins his summing-up by an announcement that he intends to remove every atom of prejudice from his mind. But 'obviously there is no sermon here, in spite of the respectable protest of a first-nighter. There is no
apology for murder."
Mr. Galsworthy would not be so clumsy as all that !-- to present us with a captivating criminal, whose sin was merely an accident not nearly so careless as those of a few dozen fiercely-driving motorists on the roads every week- end ! This convict is an exception. Imagine how the episodes of his escape would show, were he presented as a muscular brute, enclosed from society because he had smashed in the head of a forlorn wife and a few "unwanted" children. Had Mr. Galsworthy intended a sermon upon the general undesirability of the hunting and punishing instinct, he would have read Mr. and Mrs. Webb's treatise on the history
of our prison system, and would then have " impartially " illustrated it by reference to the repulsive sort of malefactor. Ail he has done, as it is, is to avail himself of a relatively innocent hero in order to get the full effect out of our common human instinct of fear and of self-identification with any hunted creature. He does get the full effect out of it, as, in another tone, but by the same rapid method of shifting scene, Eugene O'Neill did, in Emperor Jones. And you must take Escape merely, as its title hints, for a special incident permitting no generalization.
It is the fashion for critics to resent what is supposed to be the cinema-aspect of these brief, scenes, made familiar, as I have once or twice shown, by several contemporary dramatists. Their defect is that they leave little space for the development of subordinate character. But, as in the rapidly-passing procession of an Elizabethan chronicle play, they have the advantage of giving, in brief, a picture of crowded incident and of many sensations lived through in a couple of hours. What is important is that the intervals between the scenes should be reduced to the very briefest manageable darkness ; and, I may add, that there should be no punctuating and distracting applause. This last aim the producer cannot attain. Irrelevant din is the fault of: our fidgety audiences who spoil their own pleasure by their own silliness.
In spite of their episodic nature, the minor parts are excel- lently developed all round at the Ambassadors ; and one remembers the silhouettes of an enchanting pyjama-clad young person (Miss Mollie Kerr), who shelters ;.he convict for a night ; of Mr. Paul Gill's blunt farmer, keen for the uprooting of the fox ; of Mr. Leon M. Lion's sceptical magis- trate, who knows the convict, but will not betray him ; and of Mr. Austin Trevor's parson, in the culminating scene. But it is Mr. Hannen's opportunity. He dominates all the rest.
R. J.
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