THEATRE
The Dragon's Mouth. By J. B. Pfiestley and Jacquetta Hawkes. (Winter Garden.) " BICKER, bicker, bicker, eh Mr. Priestley ? " I am quite persuaded, after having listened to Mrs Hawkes' and Mr. Priestley's dramatic quartet, that argument unadorned can never be theatrically satisfying. Descartes insists somewhere that if neither of two men, after an hour's disputation, has convinced the other, then both are in the wrong ; here, in The Dragon's Mouth, is a multiplication of fallacy, a quad- ruple wrongness, without even the spontaneity of real debate to sustain it.
The authors have isolated four generalised human types—an aesthete, a pragmatist, a hedonist -and a Moralist—and set them on a
yacht, cruising in the Caribbean. There is plague aboard, and a sample of each traveller's blood has been sent to the shore for analysis : the radio signals that one of them is infected, breaking down before it can disclose Which one. Interval. After which the foursome, who have up to now been explaining their several reasons for living, settle down to explaining their reasons for dying. They squat, static on stools, for most of the evening, speaking through microphones and frankly addressing the audience as much as each other. This method, Mr. Priestley suggests, is a return to the oldest traditions of the drama," though I cannot see that it is much more than a return to the morality play at its fifteenth-century nadir, when it had degenerated into a nebulous eschatological debate between abstractions. The point is that argument, interlarded with food, wine and cigarettes, can make tolerable listening ; conducted by men and women of genius, it can refresh the soul ; and, enlivened by one's own participation in it, it can climb to the upper reaches of joy. But when not one of these conditions is fulfilled, it is a cheerless sport, best left to pedagogues.
The Dragon's Mouth would probably flake good reading as it stands, but it would take Miss Garbo, Miss Hepburn, Mr. Gielgud and Mr. Orson Welles to make it good seeing or hearing. Miss Dulcie Gray, Miss Rosamund John, Mr. Michael Denison and Mr. Norman Wooland, the present combatants, are unable to resist the - temptation of playing, not people, but kinds of people. Mr. Denison, as the dry-hearted sciolist, is best served and emerges best, parti- cularly from a long speech, late in the evening, about the causes of his spiritual aridity. Miss Gray jauntily investigates the part of the unabashed voluptuary, finding in it some broad hints of Mrs. Miniver, and Mr. Wooland, a pouting industrialist, catnip to women, rises well to his best opportunity, a swingeing piece of rhetoric in which he cites Marx and Freud themselves as proofs that Marxism and Freudianism are mistaken in their low estimates of human initiative. In fact, there is enough muscular prose lying about unassimilated to make one regret that the authors have chosen to set their face against welding it into a play.
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