The Theatre
r" THE HEIR." BY ANTOINE Bt BESCO. AT THE GATFI THEATRE. '4 MR. FAINT-HEART." By IAN HAY. AT THE SHAFTESBURY THEATRE.] WaTcrmic Prince Antoine. Bibesco's play—certainly the most interesting produced in London for many weeks—one remem- bers La Bruyere's maxim : "An old man in love is a great deformity in Nature."
Alas, this abnormality, this trick of Nature's, is, like others, very common, in drama as in life ! It is the theme of many an old comedy. The classical instance is the jealousy- tortured Arnolphe of Moliere's L'Ecole des Femmes. But the aged Lord Sark of The Heir is beyond jealousy.
His lonely villa in Biarritz is frequented only by a nephew and niece who are the modem equivalents of those sycophants who haunted the last days of Ben Jonson's Fox. They wait for the old man's end, simulating concern for him, protesting affection. He does not believe them ; but how much drier grows his shrivelled soul as he lives, an invalid and in pain, in that air of cynical distrust !
All this is crude enough, with the added touch of a grotesque stinginess in the old man's portrait. But a new birth, a new life, a hope of rejuvenation, enters in the person of a young lady doctor—I refuse to call her, with the programme, a
" doctoress "—who appears to be, rather, a masseuse, or perhaps an osteopath. Her manipulations relieve pain and excite—affection. She is something fresh ; arriving thus at the eleventh hour, when hope, long abandoned, may yet miraculously fill the decrepit heart with dreams. The situa- tion, one sees, could be treated tenderly, sentimentally, merci- fully.
But Lord Sark's dreams are not paternal. They are the thwarted and reminiscent longings of tin vixillard amoureux. They are a deformity in nature ; since they demand imbecile concessions from the young woman, such as the promise to parade, like Monna Vanua, nue sous le manteau. The situation on those lines is developed to the verge of disgust. One is saved from nausea by the thought that these pitiable pleadings really represent a sort of ideal, a striving towards beauty, irrecoverable by him, in the old man's mind. Yet he remains— the author's skill here is altogether admirable—a " nasty " old man. His delusions or dreams do not soften him.
Rapidly seduced by the hard-hearted nephew, who ought also to be hard-faced, but isn't, in Mr. Glen Byam Shaw's person, the lady doctor will, as they politely say, " present " her husband with an infant who will be the legal heir and cut the real father out. A " sell " of course !—well-merited. But we do not laugh. The atmosphere is too close.
In presentation, the play dragged a little, when I saw it, on account of uncertainty in the actors' memories, or at any rate in Mr. Esme Percy's. He was much too slow ; otherwise very good. An actress new to me, Miss Greta Keller, played the doctor with great ability and yet with a sort of nebulousness, probably due to the character, which is not clearly defined. One is not sure, till towards the end, whether this Noemi Kent is scheming, or passive and full of pity. Her collapse in the seduction scene came as a surprise. It may be explained by an unaccustomed consumption of liqueur brandy. One must also praise the perfectly poised valet of Mr. Antony Eustrel, and one must thank Mr. Peter Godfrey for a very profitable even- ing at the Gate Theatre.
Mr. Ian Hay provides another merry entertainment at the Shaftesbury Theatre. His Mr. Faint-Heart is unfortunately also a Mr. Tongue-Tied ; and evenings spent with stammerers are a little trying. I do not see why Mr. Basil Foster, who plays the hero, should not have been allowed to show his skill, in the suggestion of an amiable timidity, without faltering speech. He would have been well able to convey a true soul's amorous devotion, unassisted by intermittent garglings, stumb- lings and tardiloquence. As a matter of fact Mr. Faint-Heart does a bold thing in pretending to be a famous, worthlessly best-selling novelist who wins the female heart by the sinewy embraces of his last chapters. It is great fun when the curtain goes up on the last act, and you see the real novelist hammering out his stuff on a type-writer in the private saloon of the liner where all this happens. Mr. Clive Currie makes a splendid caricature, with tigrish teeth, of the man who lives on others' sentimentality : though we know that in real life the thing is never done like that—tongue in cheek—but that the big-seller means what he sells. The eugenist, too, may object, on national grounds, to the marriage of Mr. Faint- Heart and the young person of rudimentary intelligence whom he at first impresses by a lie. But who knows ? Nature is incalculable. These two noodles may produce a family of geniuses, or at least of big-sellers. And it would be absurd to worry about the future of puppets.
RICHARD JENNINGS.
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