Modern Plays
Six Plays. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.) • FIVE of the Six Plays have it in common that each tells with considerable skill a story which turns out to have no very memorable quality. Design for Living, the piece which Mr. Noel Coward has had produced in America but not so far in England, scarcely asks to be remembered. It arranges and re-arranges with extraordinary dexterity a minage-a- trois, trusting to the quick brilliance-of the wit, the cool impudence of the theme and the resourcefulness of the actors to make it the nine days' wonder of the town ; and even in cold print it is continuously diverting. Mr. Priestley in Dangerous Corner appears at first sight to be a bold and disinterested investigator of his characters' past, but so many and so scarlet are the sins that he finds among a few people that soon we suspect him of " framing " the Mill circle in the interests of a highly ingenious and entertaining game. The play is exciting to read, indeed it is perhaps more exciting to read than to see acted, for the reader, slower than the playgoer to notice that' the dialogue is on one note, is not so quick to tire of people who never cease to confess. But once we have mastered the plot our interest in the characters and their experiences languishes, though we may look back, as we look back over a detectiVe story, to see how the trick was done.
The Rats of Norway is something of a dramatic curiosity. It holds the attention, but if we re-read it to discover precisely why love should turn Tilly into a bore, why Stevan should make a tragedy of his love and why Sebastian should find clandestine love so insupportable that he dies of it, we shall find no answer. The truth seems to be that Mr. Keith Winter, having created lively and varied characters, did not know what to do with them and resorted to meaningless violence. Mr. Somerset Maugham in Sheppey makes the nearest approach to the kind of story that we cannot forget, but there is a point at which even he, faced with the choice of representing the impact of a quickened Christianity upon the contemporary world or showing the lengths to which a particularly ill-conditioned family might plausibly go to prevent its sweepstake winnings from being given to the poor, takes the path of lesser difficulty and minor interest. Dinner at Eight, which was almost too quick for the English playgoer's eye, presents fewer difficulties to the reader, but its rewards are modest, and the sixth play, Miss Clemence Dane's Wild Decembers, spoils a story whose value we know by carrying episodic treatment of the lives of the BrontEs so far that each of the fourteen scenes is but a meagre note on its subject.
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