CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THE THEATRE
The Linden Tree." By J. B. Priestley. (Duchess.)—" The Shelley Story." By Guy Bolton. (Mercury.)—" Fly Away, Peter." By A. P. Dearsley. (St. James's.)
tsTo one has pursued the line of experiment in the theatre more stubbornly than Mr. Priestley, but in The Linden Tree he comes back to the straight. unexperimental play with the ease of one who has proved he can juggle successfully with four dimensions, but is content to display all his compacted art in three. As soon as the late-comers have settled into their seats he begins to operate upon the minds and emotions of his audience with a skill which is hardly distinguishable from magic, and with such a warmly persuasive power that even when the stage is left completely empty for an appreciable time, late in the play, it still remains dramatically busy with the traffic of proliferating ideas and recollected emotions. The grey book-lined study in which Robert Linden does a fair part of his work as professor of history in the University of Burmanley is symbolic perhaps of the drabness of our days, but it is in this room that the perpetual variety of life is displayed in a stimulating profusion. It is Mr. Priestley's special quality that he touches life at many points and has the craftsmanship to touch it surely.
The Linden family have foregathered for the Professor's sixty-fifth birthday. Dr. Jean Linden, communist or scientific materialist, is there, and Marion, turned Catholic and married to a French land- owner. " It was like being in a car with Thomas Aquinas and Lenin," says Rex Linden, who has driven them down for the birthday celebra- tion. Rex is a wealthy stockbroker, in his own words " a de luxe model spiv." Dinah, the remaining member of the family, is a charmingly fresh and innocent child with an enthusiasm for the 'cello, Elgar's concerto in particular. Out of these conflicting atti- tudes and ideas several amusing and lively family quarrels develop, but the central theme is provided by Mrs. Linden's determination that her husband shall retire and leave the provincial town she so much detests, and by his just as deeply rooted determination not to run away from life, like all the others except Dinah, but to carry on working towards sweetness and light while there is still work to be done and he is capable of doing it.
Sir Lewis Casson as the Professor has the most difficult part. If Linden were obviously a teacher of outstanding power, it would be easy, but we are not at all sure that it would not be better if Linden did retire. He bewilders rather than enlightens the two students who come for special lessons. And yet he is a man of such integrity. It is the measure of Sir Lewis's skill that the balance between those two opposites is admirably kept. Dame Sybil Thorndike's portrayal of Isabel Linden is brilliantly sure, and of the other players in the Linden family it can only be said that they build the play up to a complete and satisfying whole, while Miss Everley Gregg achieves a rare success as the cockney housekeeper.
This is the first post-war production of the London Mask Theatre, and at the present low ebb in the fortunes of the London theatre it comes as a real refreshment of the spirit. * * * *
The Godwin-Shelley-Byron story was a bit of theatre which slipped off the stage into real life, but put it back on again and it does not seem to fit. That was what I felt at the Mercury, where Mr. Guy Bolton's The Shelley Story is now being played. The trouble with those dramas which appear ready-made in history is that it requires such a powerful creative genius to bring them on to the stage at all convincingly. The dramatic illusion must have unusual power of itself—as in Shaw's St. Joan—otherwise the real drama will appear to be working itself out not before our eyes, but along some other stretch of the time-dimension, in some more remote part of the serial universe. This is where Mr. Bolton has fallen short. He has faithfully enough reproduced the external situations which make up this extraordinary story, but he has not reached below the surface to those stresses and strains which give it mean- ing. It is true that he has caught something of Byron's force, but he has shown little of Shelley's remarkable intellect. The young fellow whom Mr. Jack Watling portrays, always restless and never lacking in admirable enthusiasms, is likeable enough, but he could not have come within any imaginable distance of writing Prometheus Unbound. Mr. John Bailey has much greater success with the Byron part. This is understandable enough ; it is the most positive part in the play, and Mr. Bailey brings to it a considerable sardonic power. He is to be commended, too, for reading some lines of Shelley as poetry should be read. Others in the cast, who are called upon to
quote snippets of verse, mumble to the footlights and then declare that what they have so casually mangled is lovely, magnificent, or the work of true genius. Miss Iris Russell and Miss Jennie Laird are competent as Mary Godwin and Jane Clairmont, but they are handicapped by the defeated promise of one scene after another.
* * *
Fly Away, Peter, is a novelettish suburban comedy in which slap- dash humour is ingeniously blended with sweet sentiment. The action takes place in the Hapgood household in Streatham—" so different from Balham." Most of the fun in the first act is con- nected with the difficulty young Myra Hapgood has in doing her homework in geometry. Similarly, Mr. Hapgood's homely little problem of getting a clock to strike the hour correctly provides fun at intervals throughout the play and even forms part of the final curtain. At the centre of all this domesticity is Mrs. Hapgood herself, one of those motherly souls who takes it almost as a personal insult that her children should ever grow up. Miss Margaret Barton is the life of this amusing party and Mr. J. H. Roberts is its bland, undis- turbed and undisturbing soul. Mr. Roberts also directs the play and sets everything going with accomplished ease.
HUNTER DIACK.
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