STAGE AND SCREEN The Theatre
FOR a fortnight, and a fortnight only, Sir John Martin Harvey is presenting the Gilbert Murray–Max Reinhardt version of Oedipni Rex at Covent Garden. He gave it first as long ago as 1912, and Sir John's name, rightly or wrongly, has been so much associated with drama of a one-week-stand category, that it should be said forthwith and forthright that this performance is a very different matter. Time will be short by the day these words appear, but readers within a very wide radius of Covent Garden should not lose their present oppor- tunity of seeing one of the greatest of all plays. True, one need not be a Hellenist to realise that it is a version at two removes from the original : the Greek has suffered a certain sea-change in its transference into English ; and the massive crepuscular effect of the Reinhardt vision is a metropolitan conception imposed on the simpler city-state. But in the playhouse the pedants are confounded : the play lives, and stabs the imagination with an almost unbelievable force. Nobody need fear seeing at Covent Garden this week one of those insipid reproductions of Greek drama which occasion- ally amble over a College garden in summer term. This is virile, efficient, almost unscrupulously theatrical. But if these Greek tragedies can at all be rendered in the dark and gilded cabinets which are the theatres of modem Europe, it is only by such methods of adaptation as here.
" . . . All the riches yesthr sun
Saw in this house were rich in verity,"
says the Messenger in that great concluding speech ; and the words are true of the performance in London this week.
The cast has been chosen and produced with great skill. All the chief parts are played and spoken with clear-cut distinction. If this is the so-called " Shakespearean " acting, let us have more of it. Miss. Miriam Lewes gives a fine per- formance as Jocasta, _and, Mr. Baliol Holloway's Creon is as &MY excellent as one might expect from this accomplished player. But-perhaps the best thing in the whole performance is Mr.- Franklin Dyall's rendering of the short but highly effective, part of the Messenger. Professor Gilbert Murray's Versejs here at its highest pitch,. and with Mr. Dyall's aid it is transformed into a moment of lasting beauty. All who saw Mr. ball's .performance. as Solness in The Master Builder must have recognised in .him an-actor of the very first class. Too often the dramas of crook and drawing-room have claimed him. The chorus, a supreme technical problem in any such produc- tion, is no less finely schooled, and thoroughly responsive to the temper of the play.
Of Sir John Martin Harvey himself, one can only say that it is a pleasure to see him in a part worthy of his stature. He bears his years as magnificently as his Theban crown. To young actors he is a model of sound enunciation, dignified grace and enriched experience.
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