THE PHOENIX SOCIETY—" TIS PITTY SHEES A WHORE."
THE Phoenix Society's production of John Ford's masterpiece, Tie Pilly Shees a Whore, at the beginning of this week, was one of their finest achievements. The quality of the acting was, on the whole, very high : that admirable actor, Mr. Ion Swinley, gave an exceedingly moving performance - in the part of Giovanni, and Miss Moyna Macgill as Annabella showed herself keenly alive to the dramatic and poetic qualities of the play.
"Ford," wrote Charles Lamb, "was of the rust order of poets. He sought for sublimity, not by parcels in metaphors or visible images, but directly where she has her full residence in the heart of man ; in the actions and sufferings of the greatest minds." The play was probably produced in the year 1631, when Shakespeare had been dead fifteen years and Dryden just born. The great period was already on the wane. In the blank verse we feel already an approximation towards prose and, though it can still flash up into superb passages such as Annabella's soliloquy and the exquisite poetry of her death-scene, the fire is dying out of it, and it appears rather as the decoration of a plain structure than as an organic part of a splendid design. But the instinct for the stage is still there, and that power in which the great Elizabethans excel of finding for the critical moment the phrase which overwhelms by its dazzling psychological truth—a phrase such as that terrified cry of the simpleton Bergetto as he lies stabbed in the arms of his friends : "Is this all my own blood ? " There is more, too : there is in Ford a power which many of the earlier dramatists (notably Marlowe) lacked, or at any rate preferred to subordinate and falsify in the interests of superficial dramatic effect—the power, that is, of psychological insight. "This man," says Mr. Havelock Ellis, "writes of women not as a dramatist nor as a lover, but as one who had searched intimately and felt with instinctive sympathy the fibres of their hearts. He was an analyst ; he strained the limits of his art to the utmost ; he foreboded new ways of expression."
The play was performed in Mr. Norman Wilkinson's cus- tomary setting, and it was he who designed the beautiful costumes worn by the women, which were executed by Messrs. Fraser, Treleaven and Wilkinson, Ltd. M. A.
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