Technical Skill

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 678, 1 June 1929, Page 8 (Supplement)

Technical Skill

Bernstein’s “Melo” Attracts the Parisians EFFECTS OF CINEMA AND NOVEL A new play by Bernstein has become the event of .the Paris theatrical season, and there is In the attitude of the public toward it a certain respect which makes it a little difficult at first to disengage the real qualities of the work, writes a London critic. This difficulty is further increased by the fact that Bernstein's technical mastery of his art is so great, not only in the writing of his play but in the staging of it. This technical skill is ever apparent in “Melo.” Indeed, the first and most obvious criticism to make of the play is that the author appears unable to get away from his own virtuosity. He is constantly doing what his admirers call "enlarging the limits of his art,” and what his critics describe as trying to bring into that art some of the effects which may be appropriate to the cinema on the one hand or the novel on the other. Dramatic Power Of the eleven tableaux into which the play is divided, two are absolutely silent, and in a third the speakers do not include the character chiefly concerned. And yet the scenes which really have dramatic power are those which are conducted in the traditional manner of drama, and the character which really grips the audience dramatically is that of the man in whom there is' nothing subtle, but whose great suffering Is directly laid bare.

This character is Pierre, the goodnatured, sincere and almost childlike musician, whose trust in his wife is as great as his love for her. When the play opens, the couple are entertaining his old friend the famous violinist, who has had many love affairs but has found satisfaction in none. . We see that the young wife is quite ready to become another victim, for she makes an appointment to visit, the violinist the next day, an appointment which she finds an excuse to cancel as soon as she learns that her husband is to be one of the party. The meeting takes place nevertheless, and the lady soon becomes the mistress of her husband's friend. We see her with him in a night restaurant, in company of the husband. We see her, half-dressed, hanging around his neck, as she takes her farewell of him before his departure upon a foreign tour; and we hear her promise that she will arrange to be free of her husband when he returns. We then see the means which she takes to secure this freedom, which is no less than the poisoning of Pierre. Moving Scenes At the moment when it looks as if her crime would be discovered befoi-e she has accomplished her object, the lover, returned from his tour, telephones to her, and she leaves the house to meet him. When he learns that his friend is ill, without suspecting the reason of the illness, he insists that the wife shall return to her husband’s bedside. This she does, with despair in her heart; and in the first of the two really moving scenes 'of the xilay Pierre, already on the I road to recovery—for the new docI tor, who had suspected the cause of his trouble, has quickly found a cure —is overjoyed at seeing her again, thanks her for the affection with which she has nursed him and insists on her reviving their former childish romps, one of which is that she shall turn head over heels several times on the floor in front of his bed (yes, Bernstein’s actresses have to possess all sorts of talents). It is immediately after this that she goes out of the house once more, this time to kill herself. We are then given the three scenes of dumb show to which 1 have referred. In one she is writing a farewell letter at a cafe table, while a couple of men talk noisily at the next. In another we see her tearing -off her coat on the banks of the Seine before she throws herself in. The j third shows her grave, at which first [ the husband openly and then the | lover secretly come and kneel. Fine Stagecraft After this we have a scene in the j house of an old priest, where we learu that the cousin of the dead woman, hitherto a merely episodic character, has become the wife of Pierre. The priest, in a 'speech of the most appealing sententiousness, advises her to say nothing of the secret of the crime, which she had been the first to discover. At last we come to the reallv fine scene of the pla}t Three years have passed. Neither the husband nor the lover has learned of the attempted poisoning. The husband has never even known that his oldest friend had become his wife’s lover; but as he looks back upon the past he has begun to have doubts which he never had then. He is constantly looking back upon the past; for though he is now married ... another woman and has a son, his being is still filled with the memory of her whom he has lost. Now that he Is about to leave France to live abroad and try to forget, he comes to see his friend to have these doubts set at rest. The friend continues to deny everything, though Pierre, whose ’ suspicions appear for the moment to be allayed, returns again- and again to the charge in a scene of the most human reality. Both men, indeed, are torn with jealousy, and when Pierre recites every word of the last j letter from his wife—a theatrical ef- ; feet analogous to that of the last i ac t of “La Dame aux Camelias”—the 1 man whom she had loved hut to whom she wrote no letter has to find an excuse to be alone for a few minutes with his grief. At the end the two men sit down to play together Lekeu’s sonata for piano and violin, which she had always admired.