THE list of plays which I have selected from those I have seen during the last month is not without interest. It contains one play which is not Tchekhov's finest work, but which nevertheless has no rival among the others on the list, and it was performed for exactly one afternoon by the Art Theatre under Madame Donnet. The plays next in merit—Euripides' Medea and Shaw's Candida—were given by Mr. Lewis Casson and Mr. Bruce Winston at matinÉes at the Holborn Empire for exactly one week each. Shaw's Pygmalion and Daisy Ashford's The Young Visiters may be expected to run—the former in proportion to its merits, the latter in no equality at all, either with its notoriety or its charm—for a couple of months. At a considerable distance comes Mr. Ervine's John Ferguson, a play which, if considered by the side of those I have already named, must be ranked very low, but if considered with all those I have not named—now being played at London theatres—must be ranked as respectably good, neither very much better nor very much worse than the average West-End theatrical entertainment. For John Ferguson, like Tea for Three at the Haymarket, is an entertainment, only it does not make you laugh; it entertains you as a street accident does—a very bloody street accident. Finally—leaving out the Russian Miniature Theatre, which is really Ballet—we come to Grierson's Way, the resuscitated by-product of Mr. H. V. Esmond. Here we come to a play that—if, as our tabulation almost suggests, plays run in inverse proportion to their merit—should run for ever.

Of Tchekhov's The Three Sisters I shall not attempt to say much. Like all Tchekhov's plays, it must be extraordinarily difficult to act, and I did not think that, on the whole, it was acted very well, although Miss Dorothy Massingham (Irina), Miss Helena Millais (Natasha), Mr. Tom Nesbitt (Audrey), Mr. Leyton Cancellor (Chebutikin), Mr. William Armstrong (Kuligin), and others made praiseworthy and not altogether unsuccessful efforts to present the characters they were playing. There was also something very plausible and real about Mr. Harcourt Williams's Vershinin, and Mr. Williams has a great advantage in his voice. It was the production rather than the acting that was at fault, but, inadequate as it may have been, it could not prevent the extraordinary force of the play making itself felt.

There are some people who would call Tchekhov a realist and The Three Sisters realism, but it is Mr. Ervine in John Ferguson who is the realist, if by that one means reproducing on the stage as closely as practicable what might be happening off it, with the action and language rendered as faithfully as possible. It was probably Mr. Ervine's knowledge of this fact, and the serious deficiency which it indicates, that made him introduce the village idiot to talk about "wee" stars, and give the audience what is always the realist's idea of a little poetry. As a man of letters, and not a mere theatrical hack, he knows of the utter barrenness of the photographic reproduction method in art. He probably knows also that it is not even enough to select, that the artist must create. Unfortunately this is just what the mere intellectual, the merely clever man can never do, and when he is clever enough to know that he must make an attempt at it he produces something like Mr. Ervine's village idiot, something that is borrowed and extraneous to the real matter power of the play. The poetry, the creative power of Tchekhov, on the other hand, is immanent and infuses the whole conception of The Three Sisters. So true is this that when we saw the play in the auditorium of the Court Theatre we felt that it was our lives we were watching, our destinies we were seeing played out; and this in spite of the fact that every detail of the scene was strange, every custom unfamiliar, and the wealth of local colour such as to produce a sensuous impression as strong as music.

Nothing extraordinary happens in Tchekhov's play. The characters meet, talk, fall in love, part, die in the casual way in which we all do these things—the actual events in Mr. Ervine's play are far less usual, just as a street accident is an occurrence less frequent than afternoon tea; but the whole play is an imaginative expression of the inner feelings of three human beings—the three sisters. It is extraordinarily imaginative, that is the point I want to make, and it is useless to ask me why it is imaginative—that is Tchekhov's secret. You never feel this is what actually happened three hundred miles from Moscow in the year 1892; you feel, on the contrary, that this never happened at all, but that it is what goes on inside us, millions of us, all the years of our lives, although it may never or very rarely come up to the surface of our consciousness and fill us with the spiritual agony of The Three Sisters. In Mr. Ervine's play, on the other hand, although, as I have said, the actual events are in themselves of less common occurrence, we meet with something that we feel certain must have happened yesterday and will happen to-morrow, and its significance, somehow, seems to be nil. What artistic or spiritual significance has a collision in the Strand between a taxi-cab and a lamp-post? Whatever significance it has, it is that kind of significance that Mr. Ervine's play possesses.

If The Young Visitors had been produced by that Russian Society called Zahda, or by the Russian Miniature Theatre, it would have been hailed as a wonderful masterpiece of bizarre and original art, and all the young freaks of London who frequent the Russian Ballet and sneer at Gilbert and Sullivan would have flocked to see it and talked of nothing else for months. As it is a product, however, of the despised English—the English who have produced the greatest imaginative literature of the world—and as also it has the misfortune to have been in its book form enormously popular, there is little likelihood of its being adequately appreciated. I must confess, however, that by the side of Mr. J. V. Bryant's production of Miss Daisy Ashford's The Young Visiters, the productions I have so far seen of the Zahda Art Council, which includes men of ambitious mind, and of the Russian Miniature Theatre have been distinctly jejune and unexhilarating. The Young Visiters is the later Victorian world looked at from the eyes of a child. It is, therefore, a fantasy, and the note of fantasy has been admirably struck in the stage production. Those who have read the book will naturally imagine that it is spoiled upon the stage, but they will be wrong. It is even conceivable that some—there are such people—who have not liked the book will enjoy the play immensely. They should, at all events, not let any distaste of the book's vogue prevent their seeing the play, if they have the opportunity. They will be rewarded by Mr. Harold Anstruther's marvellous presentment of that wonderful creation Bernard Clark. He is a masterpiece in costume, voice, gesture, and make-up, and I expect I shall have to wait a good many years before our Russian friends give us anything comparable for excellence with him. Another perfect—the word perfect is accurate—presentment is Mr. John Deverell's Earl of Clincham—the earl who thought that the glories of this world were but "piffle before the wind." Mr. Lawrence Hanray's Procurio is also perfect. I have never used the word perfect about any acting before, so there is obviously some magic about The Young Visiters to have three parts played perfectly. I wish I could say the same of that delightful person Mr. Salteena. Mr. Ben Field's effort is by no means without merit, but he does not satisfy our preconceived notion of what Mr. Salteena ought to be, as the others do for Bernard Clark, Clincham, and Procurio. Nevertheless, as we get more used to Mr. Field's Salteena we get more satisfied with him. We never, unfortunately, became satisfied with Miss Edyth Goodall's Ethel Morticue, clever as Miss Goodall undeniably is. Miss Goodall's Ethel is sophisticated, Ethel was not. The Prince of Wales at the Levee was excellent, and the Duchess's singing of Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay superb. It was an inspiration to think of it.

Of Mr. Esmond's play, Grierson's Way, I should say no more if it were not that it has been praised by the same critics who have written of the "filth" of Dryden's Marriage À la Mode. Those of us who pride ourselves on a somewhat catholic taste, who can see the good points of a revue, a musical comedy, a melodrama, a farce, and a tragedy, who find that, although we may prefer Webster, Dryden, and Tchekhov to Shaw, and Shaw to Arnold Bennett, and Arnold Bennett to Oscar Asche, we are none the less able to be amused by the Pounds sisters in Pretty Peggy, and to enjoy Alfred Lester in The Eclipse—those of us, let me add, who do not turn scarlet at the sight of a bare back are still—strange as it may appear to the pharisaical and the prudish—not without moral sense. And Grierson's Way is a play that offends our moral sense. It is, I would venture to add—using the word with its true but not its current popular meaning—a thoroughly immoral play. That is to say its ideas are false, its sentiment slobbery, and thoroughly rotten with the rottenness of bad fruit. It is worth discussing the play because so few people know a bad thing when they see it. They judge by externals, not by the spirit, for the simple reason that it is so very much easier. Their idea of morality is like that of the old lady who overheard her gardener say "Damn" and said "What a bad wicked man!" and dismissed him, although he was an honest, good-hearted fellow, to put in his place a smooth-tongued, insincere rogue who cheated her for the rest of her life. Of course it served her right; men and women have no excuse to throw up the task of feeling and thinking after real righteousness and beauty in Art or Life for the easy rule-of-thumb method of judging everything by rote or formula. No doubt it is terribly difficult for many of them to feel either beauty or ugliness, good or evil, but without that sensitiveness of the intelligence they can never hope to criticise the productions of the human mind. The foot-rule, whether it is a rule for measuring "damns" or split infinitives, or rapes or murders, or the number of bare backs in a play, is useless for measuring its artistic quality, and a play can have no other quality, provided its murders are not real and its indecencies not practised before our eyes.

In Grierson's Way we have the story of a girl who is loved by a middle-aged bachelor who has a maundering delight in bad music, and also by a once famous violinist, who has lost an arm in an accident, and now is a doddering drunkard, who talks of Art and his soul in the approved manner of the sentimentalist who does not realise what an offence his sickly, insincere slobber is to any profoundly-feeling, austere, and clear-brained artist. The girl has fallen in love with an Army man of the conventional novelette type, who is already married; she is about to have a child by him when she gets a letter from him to say that he is going away and will never see her again. The middle-aged bachelor offers to marry her as a way out of the difficulty; she accepts. The man she loves returns, his wife having died, and the husband, at the instigation of the violinist, commits suicide. The curtain falls leaving this creature expressing with sickly gusto his opinion that the dead husband will now stand for ever between her and her happiness. This account of the play's theme can give no idea of the false sentiment, the maudlin splutter of fine words, and the melodramatic rant with which the play is loaded. Miss Cathleen Nesbitt strove to preserve some personal dignity in the foul mush of words that flowed from the invertebrate jelly-fish around her, but nothing she could do could redeem the play, which is, frankly, disgusting.

DRAMATIC LITERATURE

PROBLEMS OF THE PLAYWRIGHT. By Clayton Hamilton. Allen & Unwin. 7s. 6d.

This is a book by an American critic, and it ranges over almost the whole field of dramatic art. Although it consists mainly of articles reprinted from American magazines, it is on a much higher general level of intelligence and taste than we are accustomed to expect from work of this kind. Mr. Hamilton discusses all the modern English dramatists, and, although he is not free from his countrymen's tendency to exaggerated praise—for instance, few English critics of reputation would endorse his opinion that Hindle Wakes is "a great work"—yet he is far from being undiscriminating, and his criticism of Mr. Shaw and Mr. Galsworthy is penetrating and fresh. Mr. Hamilton has the great merit of thinking for himself instead of merely repeating the current catchwords of the day. He is not afraid to argue that Henry Arthur Jones and Pinero are finer dramatists than Mr. Bernard Shaw, but, on the other hand, he can appreciate Mr. Chesterton and Lord Dunsany. Again, he is full of ingenious suggestions on the subject of dramatic construction, but he is far more conscious of the foolishness of dogmatising and laying down hard-and-fast rules than such a good critic even as Mr. William Archer, to whom his book is dedicated. On the subject of American plays, as represented by the work of Mr. George M. Cohan, he is scathingly severe, and that is a good omen for the future of the drama in America.

W. J. TURNER

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