"St. Helena." By R. C. Sherriff and Jeanne de Casalis.
At Daly's Theatre HAS ,anyonce since Shakespeare drawn a wholly satisfactory portrait of a Great Man on the stage ? I doubt it. There is a
smell of the fair-ground, of the Bearded Lady or the Fattest Man Alive, about both the writing and the reception of drama, dealing with the giants of history. We are snobs, and in the theatre, both when the Great Man is being great and when he is displaying-those endearing quips and foibles which prove that be :is only human after all, our appreciation of the play is based to some extent on preconceptions and false values.
But ; Mr. Sherriff and Miss de Casalis have taken a name which is the biggest household word in history and written round the closing years of the man who bore it a play almost entirely free from snobbishness and theatricality. Almost, but not quite. Whether the fault is in their writing or in the otherwise brilliant playing of Mr. Keneth Kent (I suscect it is in. the latter),there is something a little forced, a little self-conscious,- about the exile at Daly's. Mr. Kent, ordering a cow to be bought or a peach tree to be transplanted, seems to see as quickly and to relish as much as we do the irony of the situation. This is wrong ; it is the audience, and perhaps the other players, but certainly not Napoleon, who should hear behind the incisive marshalling of domestic amenities the th'under of vanished armies marching to past victories. But this is a small blemish, which, for all I know, the writing or the production made unavoidable, on a very fine perform- ance. The rest of the cast give discreet and competent support, Mr. Leo Genre's Montholon and Mr. Cecil Trouncer's Hudson Lowe being particularly satisfactory.
Savc, for the shooting (in a strangely unprofessional way for an ex-gunner) of what appears to be a guinea-fowl, the play is empty of incident ; it has been shortened drastically since it was first presented, but it might with advantage be shortened further.- The exile is an unconscionable time
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