TOTALITARIAN JUSTICE ON THE STAGE
By PETER FLEMING TT is odd, it is even a little discreditable, that none of the dictatorships has as yet officially disowned Justice. The Christian religion, objective truth, family loyalty, fidelity to treaty obligations—these, with many other outmoded fetishes, have been sent opprobriously packing. Justice unaccountably survives. In Italy, Germany, and Russia courts still meet, judges preside, counsel inveighs, codes are invoked; and sentences are passed. It is true that Justice has come down in the totalitarian world. She is, despite the cold and formal majesty with which they continue to deck her, a poor relation, stooping perforce to base shifts at the behest of a braw young family who keep her on in the old house in the hope that neighbours will be impressed by her traditional integrity. But the tradition is in tatters now, and it is to be feared that the poor old girl does more harm than good, particularly when she gets into the papers. Vyishinsky, for instance, is entitled to a pension from the Fourth International when he retires ; I am sure M. Trotsky will be only too glad to pay it.
From a human, if not from a legalistic point of view, totalitarian justice is a most interesting and suggestive institution. All the more welcome, therefore, is the produc- tion—in a theatrical season whose almost unrelieved banality has been widely criticised—of Judgement Day, by Elmer Rice. This play, whose opening night clashed (unsuccessfully) with a spate of opera, a Maugham revival, a Gate Theatre post mortem, on degeneracy in the Deep South, and—as far as the Sunday papers were concerned—Herr Tauber's bouquet-bath at the Lyceum, has attracted little attention. This was bad luck ; but I understand that the play, whose run at the Embassy, ends on Saturday, will next week reappear in the West End. It has been breaking records at Swiss Cottage.
It deserves to. Shakespeare wrote for all time ; but the modern dramatist—even if he is a Shakespeare—does not, as Shakespeare did, start from scratch. Lear meets the storm, not on sodden English soil, but on a plateau in limbo ; and on the self-same spot—mulandis not mutatis—Othello silences the Cyprus tocsin, Hamlet goes mole-hunting, and Macbeth communes with hags. Today it is different. The stage is no longer a depersonalised No Man's Land between Time and Space. Your attempts at universality, your efforts to be "for all time," must be as practicable (to lift a word from stage-directions) as Mr. Milne's French windows. You are tied to a period, to an idiom, to tendencies and currents of ideas. Ibsen, Pine,ro, Shaw, Gals worthy, even Maugham- how quickly they require the proteetion of glass cases, how inescapably they date.
Times change. But they change more rapidly now than they ever did before, and the theatre—which mirrors them and makes its comment—earns our respect by the force and aptness of the latter. But propaganda has blurred the issues here ; though many things are said which needed saying, audibility is put before entertainment and we shy away from the braying megaphones of partisans. In judgement Day Mr. Rice avoids all the fashionable pitfalls. A playwright of versatility and distinction, he 'subordinates dogma to drama. The result is as exciting as The Sign of the Cross ; but it is interesting and important as well, for Mr. Rice deals with contemporary martyrs.
They are, of course, anonymous and Ruritanian. (I wonder, all the same, whether Carlton House Terrace diplomacy will _take the West End production lying down.) The action of the play is confined to a court-room in the, capital of a State in South-Eastern Europe. Three prisoners are arraigned for the attempted assassination of that State's Dictator. One is a young anarchist, whose .fieriness, chilled and tempered by the certainty of death to a devastating irony, is well conveyed by Mr. Eric Berry. One is a girl, the wife— or widow, as she is cruelly made to believe—of the leader of an underground Opposition. The third is a tranced and broken creature, a tool of the dictators' planted on the other two who must be made to win execration as Caesar's dastardly assailants and thus discredit the Opposition.
Urbane almost (we fear at first) to the point of cynicism, Mr. Rice conducts the trial with the maximum of skill and Mr. Murray Macdonald's swift, smooth production triumphs over the exigencies of short rehearsals. Our sympathy is at once enlisted with the defendants, among whom the local Van Der Lubbe (whose horrific and obsequious torpor Mr. Philip Leaver radiates very creepily indeed) cannot properly be numbered. Mr. Berry, though unbalanced, is appealing ; and Miss Catherine Lacey, taut and pathetic, would melt the heart of Colonel Blimp. On our side of the footlights (as no-one knows better than Mr. Rice) the jury is unanimous for acquittal from the moment when Miss Lacey's little daughter—ably, unpre- cociously, and irresistibly presented by Miss Glynis Johns— gives her pellucid evidence.
But the real. heroine of this melodrama (which is how Mr. Rice disarmingly describes it) is not the poignant Miss Lacey nor yet the pig-tailed Miss Johns. It is totalitarian Justice ; and for that precariously statuesque lady no happy ending supervenes, as it does for the other two in the shape of a rather arbitrary counter-revolution. For , totalitarian Justice the piece is a tragedy ; the poor old girl comes out looking as if she had been dragged through a hedge back- wards. Mr. Rice discomforts her deftly. The bribed . State witnesses, the faked exhibits, the jury's maudlin mechanical enthusiasm at any mention of the Leader, the licensed hectoring of the Prosecutor (whom Mr. Reginald Jarman plays compellingly, and well)—all the preposterous and yet terrible tricks of the trade are brought to bear on the prisoners. On the Bench, where five judges sit, right fights a rearguard action against might. Two of the judges are creatures of the Leader. A third is a temporising and cautious jurist, a Vicar of Bray when it comes to the test. Slatarski, an old aristocrat, puts honour before everything and is prepared to accept the consequences ; Mr. Hubert Harben, in this role, mans the last ditch splendidly. But two dissentients are by law required if a spanner is to be thrown into the machinery of Juggernaut ; and though Mr. Douglas Jefferies shows the President of the Court to be an upright man, he is torn between his duty to Justice and a judge's oaths and his duty, as a patriot, to the Leader's will. Mr. Rice sees to it that we share the President's agony of mind, though for different reasons. The suspense is brilliantly maintained until the Leader himself takes the witness stand and a coup de theatre brings down the curtain.
The play was licensed,. for performance in this country as long ago as 1933; just after the Reichstag fire trial, as a matter of fact. Today its thrills have even more topical edge, its lessons are even more apt, than they were then. Many will find the Court Room atmosphere oppressive and even appalling, the methods of the prosecution too inhuman to be true to life. In actual fact the proceedings in Judgement Day are a picnic compared with the reality they represent. We are indeed revolted when the accused woman's little daughter is subjected to mental torture by the prosecution ; but there is no hint that anything untoward will happen to her when she leaves the Court, nor is the child's welfare used as a lever to extort confessions from her mother. Mr. Rice, in fact, virtually ignores the "hostage system," the vilest and the commonest expedient which totalitarian justice employs to tip her scales. In the play, moreover, the prisoners although deprived 4s is customary, . of food and sleep, are at .least allowed to have their -say ; ..and the defence is permitted to bring int6_ Court: a witness the diverting person of a primu. donna whose .relationship to a neighbouring dictator is a safe-conduct for her daring .tongue—who gives evidence of a kind .yetk damaging to the Dictator's closest colleague. In Mr. Rutitania the . outlook for innocence is often black ; but, the stage demanding an alternation of light and shade, it is never that doomed and all-pervasive grey which is the true ColOur. of totalitarian Justice. For all that, the lady is here presented to the, life, though the portrait is in some respects, as I have .said, a -flattering one It is well worth making her acquaintance, even were the play half as exciting as kis. But rertienther,that for the , . people who . fall foul of her in real life—Jews, and " TroiskYistS," and other unfashionable creatiireS, .of whom not a few are innocent—there is never a happy ending. -
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