Theatre
"The Late Christopher Bean." Adapted from the French of Rena Fauchois by Emlyn Williams. At the St. James's Theatre.
THE gods have queer ways of showing their affection. Chris- topher Bean died young, of drink and tuberculosis. The latter affliction he might have survived in a kinder climate than the Midlands offered ; but the world saw at the time no merit in his paintings, and the_South of France was out of the question. He was neglected.
And neglected for the best of reasons, thought the Haggetts, a sublunary menage who made his last days easier by lending him a cow-shed to paint in. His memory they held in tolerant contempt, and to his canvases they allowed only a utilitarian value, using them to stop leaks in the hen-house roof, and for kindred purposes. Some years after his death, however, the whirligig of taste (never more erratic in its convolutions than in respect of modern art) caught up and exalted the name of Bean. The world awoke to the recognition of a prodigious and unsuspected talent. There was a boom in Beans, and when the publication in a literary periodical of his letters from the Midlands disclosed the scene of Bean's latest labours, the art-dealers descended, vulture-like, upon the Haggetts, flourishing cheque-books. Where were those masterpieces mentioned in the letters ?
This is the situation from which the play develops. In great part it is a study in greed, and a subtle one. When we first see him Dr. Haggett is, in terms of character and its ex- pression, a minus quantity. Dim, shabby, ineffectual, oppressed, he strives without zest to reconcile the social ambi- tions of his wife and daughters with his patients' reluctance to pay their bills. He is the type of the underdog ; we can trace in him no more positive quality than a certain cunning. But observe him when the curtain falls, a minus quantity no longer : a figure defeated but dynamic, a worm grown into a monster, but a monster who still crawls, wriggles, will stoop to any baseness under cover of blatant hypocrisies. His very shuffle has become a galvanic and a bounding gait. Sir Epicure Mammon and Sir Giles Overreach at least confessed their greed ; Dr. Haggett huddles his up, and so is worse than they.
His wife and a shrewish daughter abet him. After a bad start, they overhaul the double-dealing connoisseurs and maintain a lead which can be reckoned in depths of duplicity. But in the end chicanery avails them not at all. Their cheats are exposed and countered by Gwenneth, the Welsh maid, who was more than a friend to Bean and who owns his master- piece, a portrait of herself, She will not part with it for senti- mental reasons ; bribes, tricks, and threats are alike powerless against her loyalty to the artist's memory. So at the last she leaves them sunk in their shame and no richer for the submer- sion.
This is a brilliant comedy, and its adaptation from the French by Mr. Emlyn Williams is—like so few adaptations,-- complete and satisfactory, and not a hasty, wholesale trans- plantation. The acting could not, in the case of the principals, be bettered. Gwenneth, alone of the characters, is drawn in the round, and her reality is the crucial element in affairs which, because the comedy is slightly fantastic, are of necessity artificial in their essence. Her true heart is the rock on which the storms of intrigue and avarice break in vain, and since intrigue and avarice are presented with their ludicrous sides uppermost, there is danger that the simple sincerity of her emotions may spoil the unity of the piece and throw the picture out of focus. Or there would be -danger, were not Miss Edith Evans Gwenneth. Her performance is masterly. How subtly:her sense of comedy exploits those Welsh cadences for our diversion, and with how imperceptible a transition she stills our laughter and; in brief interludes among an this comicality; touches emotions -which we. had supposed f■treiga to the context Miss Evans has done nothing better ,,once her Nurse in Romeo and Juliet.
Mr. Cedric Hardwicke is not less good as Dr. Haggett. Inexpressibly moth-eaten in appearance, his portrait of this distraught homunculus is a comment—neither tart nor tolerant, but true—on half the follies of mankind. His acting has an extraordinary quality of fluency ; mind, voice, and body work together -in what appears to be an instinctive harmony. He has developed to a high degree that power of acting with the whole body which is so rare upon the English stage ; his attitudes are an unforced expression of character and a discerning footnote on the situation. He can put the soul of wit into the consumption of a glass of milk. Too much good acting is squandered on bad or unlucky plays ; it is en- couraging to think that Mr. Hardwicke's Dr. Haggett and Miss Evans' Gwenneth will be on view for many months.
Miss Louise Hampton plays. the doctor's dragon of a wife with acid and revealing humour ; if her performance is on ever so slightly broader lines than the two already mentioned it is not less effective than they. Among the minor characters Mr. Barry K. Barnes sketches with pleasant assurance the lover of the more amiable Miss Haggett. The production, though inclined to slowness, is sound. But I -think it is bad policy, having focussed the audience's whole interest on Bean's canvases, to show only the backs of them on the stage. It arouses in us an extraneous but powerful curiosity. As the pictures are handed from one character to another we become obsessed with speculations as to whether there is really any- *thing painted on the front of them, and if so what it is. Our attention wanders off after an irrelevant detail, and we find ourselves, as it were, thinking in two mediums at once, mostly in the wrong one. This could be avoided. There is probably no period in the history of art when a masterpiece in oils has been easier to counterfeit.
PETER FLEMING.
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