STAGE AND SCREEN The Theatre
"Meeting at Night." By Margery Sharp. At the Globe Meeting at Night is an addition to that swollen and catholic class; the plays which are almost a success. It is charac- teristic of an age of talented mediocrity that it should sponsor so many competently designed and well-written plays, and so few with the intellectual distinction that alone could insure them against a quick oblivion. Most of the plays which achieve production today reach an adequate level of technical efficiency ; few have an original or a fertilizing approach to their subjects. With Miss Sharp the case is altered : her subject is of considerable interest, but the technical defects in her treatment of it (aggravated by a somewhat too leisurely production) rob it of much of its effect. Her play, like most others which merit considera- tion, remains not quite a success.
Meeting at Night is a psychological study of fear. Its chief characters are an engaged couple, Harold Parker and Delia Crowborough. They are not in love with one another, and of interests in common they have only a professional attitude towards publicity, she as a Society beauty, he as a pilot who depends for his living on making records in long-distance flights. In publicity in fact has been the main source of their engagement. Harold's employers have encouraged it as a means of gaining additional advertisement for his exploits, while Delia, no longer a debutante, sees in the manoeuvre an opportunity for publicity of an unusual kind and an arrangement conveniently terminable when this has been achieved, sensational indeed even in its probable ending. She expects, in fact, that he will ultimately crash.
Her plans receive a setback when his nerves collapse as he is about to start on a record-breaking flight to Australia. A party assembled out of doors to watch him fly overhead is broken up by his reappearance in the garden and on his feet. He confesses to Delia that he has not had the courage to start. The better part of an act (it is the most successful in the play) is taken up as he describes to her the origin and growth of a reputation for intrepidity acquired at the outset with misgivings and almost by accident, and sustained in growing terror as a condition of making a living. With the collapse of his legend, Delia also is drawn to probe beneath the surface of her self-esteem. They discover a new resolution in their ability to discard pretences to one another. The engagement is transformed into a love-affair, and they spend the night together. By the morning Harold has acquired the courage to start on his flight to Australia. At noon a broadcast message announces that he has crashed in flames. In the last scene Delia announces to the battalion of reporters who have arrived to chronicle her reactions to the tragedy that she has discarded the mode of existence that they created for her. She has discovered, she tells them, a new and serious attitude towards life. It is a quite credible, but not a particularly illuminating conclusion.
The play has two good scenes—the second, in which Harold and Delia reveal their pretences to one another, the third, in which Delia's new spirit is shown after Harold has started on his flight—and they are so good that one regrets all the more the defects in the remaining two scenes. In the first scene, to the exclusion of action and the subordination of the other characters, the stage is monopolised by the reporters so brusquely to be banished at the end. For a whole act Delia's superficiality is obliquely elaborated through their presence, while Mr. Roger Livesey, who plays Harold Parker, has no opportunity to do more than appear vaguely uneasy in the background. It is only the incisiveness of Miss Leonora Corbett's study of Delia that redeems a scene markedly written without economy. To Miss Corbett also must go most of the credit for the effect of the second and third scenes : in the second for adding life to a passage which Mr. Livesey's quiet manner and delivery threatened to turn into a soporific, in the third for giving momentum to the play's development where less pointed treatment would have allowed its force to be dispersed. In the last scene Miss Sharp liquidates the play's problems in a way that can command assent but not con- viction, and it is to Miss Corbett again that the credit must be given for the measure of success that it achieves. There is no better performance than hers to be seen in London. DEREK VERSCHOYLE.
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