"THE ADORED ONE."

Dominion, Volume 7, Issue 1886, 21 October 1913, Page 8

"THE ADORED ONE."

' 1 J ; M. BARSIE'S HISSED PLAY. ] Early in' September a cable message was received stating that a now play by J. M. Barrio entitled "The Adored Ono " had been hissed on the night of its first production in London, and admirers of the gifted writer of "Tho Little Minister," "Peter Pan," and " What Every Woman Knows " marvelled. On perusal of tho lioticcs the case would hardly appear to bo as bad aS tho cable message mado out.. It would , seem that towards the end Barrio bocomes prolix and stodgy to such a degree that not oven tho art of Sir John Hare, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and Mr. Godfrey Tearle could save the play from becoming tedious. Tho London dramatic correspondent of the "Manchester Guardian" wrote of tho play as follows: — " It lias many delightful lines, many quaint turns of comedy, many moments of true penetration iuto character. But it was penetration observed from without, not felt from within. Moreover, delightful as much of it was—especially in. tho first act—it was too fanciful ana selfish and v trivial for a three-act play. In construction, too, it had nono of the ingenious if sometimes rather obvious twists and surprises of theatrical cffcct with which the audienceVint-erest in a Barrio play is generally so cleverly sustained. Its first act was delicious, and promised as we'll as could be. A young man is left alono to meet tho other guests at a dinner party while 'his liost. and hostess go to dross. He is warned that thero will be a woman with no Benso of 'humour and another with too much, a suffragette, who will bo furious if lie picks up her handkerchief and a coquette who will bo furious if ho does not llirt with her, a. womanly woman who is all Victorian graces and charming motherhood and a woman who is a mother and nothing else; last of all, a woman whose claim to distinction is that sho has committed a murder. Tho comedy of tho first act is his attempt to discover which of these women is the one with whom he finds himself left alone, and his realisation at tho end of tho act that all the women are combined in the one charming creature. ' "It is most engaging comedy, and has that Barrio quality of being good writing and good art and yet never abovo the comprehension of the simple. Delicately played as it was by Mr. Godfrey Tearlo and' Mrs. Patrick Campbell, it never lost the right touch of merry, fantastic extravagapza. The second and third acts—they aro really one, for tho curtain does not fall and tho scone remains the same—might have carried on t'ho same extravagant spirit if they had been much shorter. A sort of ' Trial by Jury' legal atmosphere, with Sir John Hare as a very human old judge and the whole court trying to save Mrs. Campbell from justice and preient her repeated .attempts to toll the simple and, to her, entirely exonerating truth that she pushed' the man out of the railway carriage door because ho would not consent to "havo tho window up, and her little child had a cold—all this was good fun for a time. But it was gradually borne upon ono that the whole thing was getting rather puerile, and beforo the end downright tedious. And oven tho great Barrio popularity could not call up more than very moderate applause at tho end, and could not prevent some expressions of absolute condemnation. The judge's little liomilv to Leonora when tho trial had finished, that sho was not a real person but a dream of womanhood from our fathers, that the modern women were quite unlike her and that ' the future rests with them and not with you,' that 'if you had been real and had done_ this ' thing perhaps this, is how we should havo'behaved' —all this sounded rather solemn and pompous for what had, after all, been no more than somo very nursery fooling. "But then, perhaps, it is 311 st all part of the fundamentally simple Barrio nature, and on® could only just be sorry that 011b could not enjoy to the end tho work of a man who has given us so much' true enjoyment."