The Theatre
[" DAVID." BY D. H. LAWRENCE. AT THE R lit: ENT THEATRE.-" ASLEEP." BY CYRn. CA M PION. AT TUE DUKE OF YORK'S Tnn.vran.] WHAT is it that persuades a writer of such intense conviction and so little sense of humour as Mr. D. H. Lawrence into an adventure like that of David, which the Three Hundred Club produced, in three parts and sixteen scenes, and with the help of thirty-live players, last Sunday ?
I think I know. Like Mr. George Moore when his old nurse presented him with a Bible, Mr. Lawrence, perusing the sacred narrative, was not, could never be, content with the passive attitude of admiration. Minds more or less creative are irresistibly urged to an experiment with the matter Bias presented to them. The author, or authors, of the story of Saul and David, of Goliath and of .Jonathan, had one way of telling it. " How," says the modern " maker," or poet, " should I have done it ? " And lie does it —does it, as I said, in an enormous number of scenes, and with a vast quantity of persons ; episodically (in this case) and, unlike Mr. George Moore, soberly, reverentially, cleaving to tradition.
The result is not necessarily anything dramatic at all. Ikrc it is a series of chromolithographic '' views " of scriptural scenes and persons, expressed in an idiom which can only diverge from the Authorized Version for the worse, and resembling the cinema in that it. concentrates upon such " features " as make for tableaux—the curse of Samuel, the battle with Goliath, the exchange of vows and clothes between David and Jonathan. One thinks, at moments, of Ben Hun Another course was open to Mr. Lawrence. Turning, suppose, to the Histoire du Peuple trIsrael of Ernest Henan, he might have reconsidered the heroic talc- --might, for instance, have sceptically or realistically imagined David as a real tribal chieftain, and so given us a Shavian version of the theme ; even as Mr. St. John ):Irvine in The Lady of Belmont, produced for a few performances a day or two ago, gave us r, prolongation of The Merchant of Venice—something very amusingly written " in the margin of Shakespeare," as Jules Lemaitre would have put it. Mr. Lawrence has done nothing of the kind. his evident anxiety to follow the other tradition of miracle drama has forced him to ignore psychology—what, after all, can we know of the minds of Samuel and Saul ?—
and so to fall back upon mere show. And, under an atmo- sphere charged with fate, loud with cryings upon the name of the Lord—would that Mr. Lawrence had taken Matthew Arnold's hint and spoken, throughout, of the Eternal !—we had a picture of familiar puppets, pulled by the hoary and gory hand of a prophet, of whom Mr. Harcourt Williams tried to make an ancient in the manner of Blake ; an aged and very tedious Samuel who can do anything and frighten anybody, because he has the ear of a higher power, which urges him, I must say, to commit the most odious crimes, while he exhibits the known garrulity of his privileged tribe.
Well, it was a great effort all round ; and others, Mr. Robert Harris as a pastoral David, Mr. Frank Vosper as Jonathan, Mr. Peter Cresswell as Saul, and Miss Angela Baddeley as Michal, who wonders, with feminine practical instinct, why the war with the Philistines isn't brought to an end by unity of command or superior generalship, did their best to convince us that it pays to read Scripture with the intention of improving upon its methods of story-telling. We were not convinced. But that was not the fault of the actors.
Mr. Cyril Campion's thrilling play Asleep is another of the now frequent exemplifications of a " special case." It might happen to any man, by very bad luck, to marry a drug-taker, as Gerrard Smith (Mr. Leslie Banks) did, after years of prudent bachelorhood ; and the chances will be tilted un- favourably against us if we seek for wives in the Parisian cabarets. In one of these Gerrard met his Dolores.
Why did he marry her ? Why did he do this thing ? We are not told ; but the author has provided, in advance, that we shall not judge poor Gerrard too harshly ; for in the first scene, or " prologue," we see him pitiably dozing on the park bench to which a snow-sniffing bride has driven him. Dis- armed, we then watch his downfall, through a series of scenes from which he emerges as a good deal of a fool—a strong-weak husband who sacrifices all to his love, and becomes very rude in the process to such worthy people as Dolores' old dancing partner, passionately and picturesquely played by Mr. Dino Galvani. But why was this Gerrard asleep " ?
Because, all the time, while he was beating up cabarets for a wife, he failed to sec, at his elbow and in his own home, the longing eyes, the proffered affection, of his mother's adopted daughter, Laurine. He ought to have married her, and he does so in the end ; but why call him sleepy ? Men are often so constituted. If they admire people like Dolores (deli- riously does Miss Barbara Hoffe show us the manners of the snow-fiend !) they are apt not to notice innocent girls like Laurinc. It isn't a question of slumber, but of taste. And, obviously, Gerrard's taste was loud.
RICHARD JENNINGS.
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