STAGE AND SCREEN
THE THEATRE
" The King of Nowhere." By James Bridle. At the Old Vic.
MR. BRIDIE'S King of Nowhere is a popular actor named Frank Vivaldi, who suffers simultaneously from acute megalomania and an equally acute fear of persecution. He makes an exciting entrance, returning at midnight to his house with a grotesque make-up assumed to conceal him from imaginary enemies. In his house he finds Dr. McGilp, a mental doctor with a private home in Scotland whither his wife, who would like to have him certified, has schemed to have him removed. From the home Vivaldi, to all appearances cured of his delusions, escapes after a short period of treatment. He takes refuge in the house of a rich maiden lady who lives nearby. Fortified by an enormous legacy, she is planning a campaign to reform the world, and in Vivaldi, with whom she has immediately fallen in love, she sees the leader of her political crusade. She dresses him up in the semi-equestrian costume which dictators share with chauffeurs, and he, equipped with a new and sensational part, plays it to perfection. The movement grows, with Vivaldi as the romantic and theatrical figurehead and Miss Rimmer as its organiser and financier. Both Miss Rimmer and he are seduced by his eloquence into imagining him as a successful dictator. They both build castles in Whitehall. In the event the campaign survives only by a few hours its first mass-meeting. Miss Rimmer gets a glimpse of the brutality which dictatorship involves in practice, and Vivaldi, his former phantoms unleashed once more by his own entry into a world in which real enemies could exist, is restored with a full comple- ment of neuroses to the home of Dr. McGilp. Later we see that he has his moments of sanity, but equally that he is unlikely. to emerge again to menace his country's peace ; for once an embryo dictator is following his true vocation.
The King of Nowhere is not a neat play. Mr. Bridic has his own way of covering his country ; few people are better at stating a theme, and few more wilful at developing it. But though the development may not be always exactly to the point, it is nearly always full of ideas which hold interest in themselves—it is only in retrospect that one notices how they have led the play down a cal de sac. This play begins remark- ably well. Both the opening scene (in Vivaldi's house) and the scene which follows it (in Miss Rimmer's) are extraordin- arily effective—lively, plausible and well-knitJ After them the play loses some of its impetus, admirable passages alternating with longueurs, until finally it spins itself out to an altogether uninteresting end. Both the main characters seem to lose their interest with the collapse of their political campaign : their appearances afterwards are merely formal entrances made to complete a prearranged pattern, without independent dramatic effect. In the last scene we learn nothing new about the characters of either of them, and so the scene has only a mechanical justification. Until this last scene both these characters are interesting, and both of them are well performed. The surface brilliance of Mr. Laurence Olivier's performance as Vivaldi makes it difficult at times to guess when Vivaldi is wholly playing a part, and when he is intended to be to some degree sincere ; but as a whole it is an extremely effective piece of acting. It is perfectly balanced by Miss Marda Vanne's firmly controlled study of Miss Rimmer : this is an altogether excellent performance ; the part is open to the danger of a clever, unconvincing caricature, but here its plausibility is kept quite intact. All the other characters are strictly sub- sidiary to the development of these two, but they are all well performed. Miss Vivienne Bennett gives a pleasant sketch of Vivaldi's wife, and Miss Sylvia Coleridge provides comic relief in a quite irrelevant part. Mr. Alexander Knox is quite admirable as Dr. McGilp (his achievement is the more notable in that the part which he keeps so fresh is conceived on somewhat conventional lines of quaintness), and Mr. A. R. \Vhatmore represents with his customary skill an oaf turned dictator's A.D.C. Like most of Mr. Bridle's plays, The King of Nowhere is only a qualified success ; but, again like most of them, it is much more worth seeing than many plays which perfectly achieve their ends.
And when will the Old Vic impose a ban on pipes and a
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