STAGELAND

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 744, 17 August 1929, Page 26

STAGELAND

By

COTHURNUS

FIXTURES HIS MAJESTY’S THEATRE Now Playing: “Apple Sauce,” “Pigs,” and "Laff That Off.” August 29 (indefinite) : “Ploradora.” Amateur Operatic Society. September 4: “The Desert Song.” Lance Fairfax. September 14-21: Westminster Glee Singers. COMING “This Year of Grace,” Maisie Gay. “No. 17,” Nat Madison. ST JAMES THE/TRE Now Playing: Frank O’Brian’s Co. August 30: “Rio Rita,” Gladys Moncrieft. COMING “Lido Lady.” “Baby Cyclone” and “Good News,” Elsie Prince and Jimmy Godden. CONCERT CHAMBER August 15, 16 and 17: “General Post” Charity Production. September 11, 12, 13 and 14. —“Mrs. Moonlight,” Little Theatre Society, the Pen,” St. Andrew’s Society. September 25-28: “The Scrape o’ “R.U.R.,” a Robot play by Karel Capek, has been produced by the Canterbury Repertory Theatre with success. * * * Nat Madison is to appear in “Loyalties,” by J. C. Williamson, Ltd. He is now playing “No. 17” and “Dracula” in Melbourne, and is billed to tour New Zealand before long. Allan Wilkie is enjoying a successful season in Wellington with his early English comedies. A party from Government House attended the opening performance. Sir Joseph Ward was also present. Hundreds of police oflicers attended a performance of “Persons Unknown,” at the Shaftesbury Theatre, London, which Edgar Wallace says is the last mystery play he will produce for a long tfme. He is to concentrate on talking films.

Quite the most delightful comedy for many a day is “Laff That Off,” to be produced at His Majesty’s after “Applesauce.” It is a story of three young bachelors who suddenly find themselves w'ith a young and beautiful, but homeless, girl on their hands. They adopt her as one of “the gang,” and she becomes their housekeeper. They all fall in love with her, but she disappears with their savings. Robert, better known as “Remorse,” says “Laff That Off.” But they can’t: their faith in human nature is shaken.

“MRS. MOONLIGHT”

Ben Levy Play by Little Theatre Society AN INTERESTING PRODUCTION For its next production the Auckland Little Theatre Society has chosen “Mrs. Moonlight” by Ben Levy. The season will extend from September 11 to 14. The name part will be played by Ysolin De McVeagh, who has done some splendid work for the society. This will be the first play by Levy to be presented in New Zealand. He is the author of several interesting pieces, notably “This Woman Business” and “Mud and Treacle,” both of which enjoyed popular successes in London.

“Mrs. Moonlight,” which the author describes as “ a piece of pastiche in three acts,” deals with the story of the woman who never dies, hut comes back again and again through succeeding generations. It is a delightful and fantastic play and should prove to be a popular production by the society. An excellent cast has been chosen for the production and rehearsals are going ahead splendidly.

“General Post,” an amusing play of the war period—before and after—has drawn good houses to the Concert Chamber of the Town Hall. It has been produced by the King’s Players in aid of charity and the public has ■ responded splendidly. An able band of amateurs interprets this pleasant little version of Humpty Dumpty and his fall. In this instance Humpty Dumpty is a prejudiced English knight, played by James Swan. Others who give

Tornquist photo, good performances are Margot Finlaysou, Ethel Rae, Fred McCallum, Montagu Steele and Hamish Henderson. The season will end this evening.

ACTING IN LONDON MRS. PAT CAMPBELL AND MARIE TEMPEST The best acting on the London stage just now is coming from two actresses whose combined ages total 129 years— Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Miss Marie Tempest, says the London “Daily Mail.”

“Mrs. Campbell, in ‘The Matriarch’ at the Royalty Theatre, and Miss Tempest in ‘The Second Mrs. Fraser,’ at the Haymarket, are giving performances which, in point of instinctive cleyerness, are miles ahead of anything on the West End stage.”

I quite agree; and a noteworthy thing is that each actress is playing a part away from her usual style. In “The Martiarch,” Mrs. Campbell is playing comedy; in “The Second Mrs. Fra-

is much less of a comedy actress than she generally is. The case of Mrs. Campbell is the more remarkable in that of late years she has acted comparatively seldom. She is one of the few remaining femin ine links on the stage with the great days of George Alexander, Pinero, and Tree.

I understand that, at the age of 64, her salary is still more than £IOO a week, and that she is still the dominating personality in the theatre that she always was.

As for her performance at the Royalty, it is constantly being quoted as one of the—if not the—best pieces of acting in town. The character is that of a dominating, kindly old Jewish woman, who rules everyone. When the play was submitted to the management which presents it the decision was that only one actress in this country could really play the leading part—Mrs. Campbell. She agreed to do so, and now every audience that sees the play is in admiration of her art.

It is a brilliant “come back” after a longish absence from the London stage.

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EUGENE O’NEILL

He Interprets Life in Terms of Lives HIS AIM IN PLAY-WRITING One of the most interesting writers of plays in the Englishspeaking world today, and certainly the outstanding American playwright, is Eugene O’Neill. His plays have been produced in most European and many nonEuropean countries. He has been hailed by critics as the greatest living American playwright, while others have found many faults, and attributed his success to the praise of American George Jean Nathan. Those who seek to estimate Mr. O’Neill’s work on their knowledge of one or several plays will assuredly become confused. His work must be regarded as a whole—for he is not of those artists whose worth remains at one level. He is continually seeking to arrive at an ideal conception of playwriting. In a letter to Mr. Arthur Hobson Quinn, Mr. O'Neill has formulated his aims; ... I’m always, always, trying to interpret life in terms of lives, never just lives in terms of characters. I’m always acutely conscious of the force behind —fate, God, our biological past creating our present whatever one calls it: mystery, certainly—and of the one eternal tragedy of man in his glorious, self-destroying struggle to make the force express him instead as a being, as an animal is. an infinitesimal incident in its expression. My profound conviction is that this is the only subject worth writing about, and that it is possible—or can be—to develop a tragic expression in terms of transfigured modern values and symbols in the theatre, which may, to some

degree, bring home to members of a modern audience their ennobling identity with the tragic figures on the stage. Much fugitive criticism of Mr. O’Neill and his plays has been written. The most recent volume on the subject is “Six Plays of Eugene O’Neill,” by Mr. Alan D. Mickle (Jonathan Cape). In his prefatory note Mr. Mickle denies any attempt at a critical valuation of Eugene O'Neill’s work. “A hungry man does not attempt a critical valuation of a feast that is set before him—at least he does not until the feast is|finished, and he is no longer hungry.” His book he describes as “a testimony to the effect produced on a certain type of mind possessed by a certain wandering Australian by the reading of certain (for him) great plays written by a certain (for him) great American—that and the setting down of thoughts suggested by the reading.” The six plays with which Mr. Mickle deals are “Anna Christie,” “The Hairy Ape,” “The Great God Brown,” “The Fountain,” “Marco Millions,” and “Strange Interlude.” His opening chapter on “Anna Christie” embodies a discussion of the motive behind O’Neill's writing, which is interesting in the light of Mr O’NeiH's letter quoted above. Mr Mickle savs -

“In melodrama the hero fights against a human villain and his puppets and machinations, and always wins the fight. In real drama the hero fights against fate, and the puppets and machinations of fate, and always loses. Yet real drama’s function is always to exalt, never to depress. Probably there is in us a deep instinctive awareness that every fight man wages against fate, even though it ends disastrously for that man, is one more position gained in the great eternal battle that is ever being waged by mankind—and, certain and sure that in the end fate must win, he struggles desperately, magnificently.”

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'“Silly Plays on Marriage”

AN AMERICAN INVASION

LONDON'S COLD RECEPTION

Something will have to be done about all these American plays dealing with marriage from the American point of view, writes Allan Parsons, the London critic.

The first was a play called “Craig’s Wife,” of which the Americans thought so well that they awarded it the Pulitzer Prize. It was, in point of fact, rather a good though a bitter and gloomy play, but, even in spite of a magnificent performance by Phyllis Neilson Terry, the London public would not look at it.

Miss Neilson -Terry sent me the play to read, and I was at once convinced that the naggings of a husband and wife in an American provincial town could never interest a London audience. Besides, the type of woman she portrayed—an icy monument of selfishness worshipping only tw-o gods. Respectability and her “home” (the actual bricks and mortar and the furniture within it) —was incomprehensible over here.

Then there came that dreadful affair “Little Accident,” the theme of which was that a man, on the eve of his wedding day, found he was about to become the father of an illegitimate child. The second act provided all sorts of fun and games in a maternity hospital. “Paris Bound” came to London with a brilliant cast and a great reputation from America. The title meant nothing, to Londoners and they very soon showed that the play itself did not mean much more.

The moral of “Paris Bound” appeared to be that such trifles as infidelity should not be allowed to have much bearing, one way or the other, on marriage and its difficulties. But the London public, trained to older and simpler ideas about marriage, thought differently, and “Paris Bound” died very quietly and without any fuss on a Saturday night soon after its opening.

Then there was a silly play at the Everyman with the silly title of “Suburbia Comes to Paradise.” Husband and wife nagged once more in a New York suburb through three dreary acts, and that soon finished.

Finally there came “Young Love,” where an insane young couple certain that they cannot be faithful after marriage, decide to get the infidelity over before they marry. The Censor has added enormously to his growing reputation for sagacity by his attitude over “The Shanghai Gesture” and “Young Love.”

Meanwhile, the cry goes up, “How long?” Our own dramatists can do it all so much better—look at “The First Mrs. Fraser”—and they talk a language we understand about people who seem really to be human.

NEW AND ODD

RUSSIAN BALLET PRESENTED IN LONDON The audience went for something new and odd, and they were not deceived, at the first night of the Dioghiieff Ballet’s new piece, “The Prodigal Son,” at Covent Garden, says a London critic. Among the impressions brought away was that made by Mme. Doubrovska, who played the part of the courtesan in the scene of the orgy. Was there ever woman more strangely serpentine? There was not a hint of voluptuousness in this scene. The prodigal was fascinated by the siren’s inhuman contortions, and he joined her in those strained acrobatical feats which characterise Mr. Balanchin’s choreography. We had seen it before in such pieces as the “Pastoral” of two or three years ago, but “The Prodigal Son” proved the Russian Ballet’s capacity for being odder and odder. Another impression is that of the returning prodigal, mimed with peculiar intensity, and as though in torture, by young Serge Lifar. This scene undoubtedly was, in its strained and fantastic way, beautiful. And there were other moments in the ballet in which ingenuity came to achievement. Perhaps a full acquaintance with the new Bqlanchin technics would convince one that the whole thing is a masterpiece; but a casual opinion is that eccentric cleverness has rather outrun' the other factors in the case. The difficulties and the grotesqueness that are imposed on these lithe creatures, Lifar and Doubrovska, really oppress the spectator (though the dancers do not seem to mind); and a kind of discomfort, not to say oain, takes the edge from appreciation. At the same time, one feels that Balanchin is a serious artist, striving w-ith much intelligence to make new, expressive forms out of his long-suffer-ing human material. The plot (very slight)" was by Mr. Kochno, the scenery by Georges Rouault. Mr. Prokoviev’s music carried on in a busy, light, adequate fashion, impersonal and qlmost mechanical. The audience (all smart London) applauded handsomely. The other pieces were old friends—“ The Gods Go A-Begging” and the finale from Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty.”

Shareholders in the London theatrical firm of Clayton and Waller were told that there has been a loss of about £24,000 on the year’s working. Clayton and Waller began by an enormously successful production of “No, No, Nanette,” and the firm then proceeded to establish itself as a very vital and go-ahead concern, putting on plays at the Palace, the Hippodrome, the Lyric and the Carlton. Herbert Clayton says that the vogue of the talking films has, in his opinion, been partly responsible for this loss of nearly £24,000. “They have undoubtedly hit the theatres badly, but I believe that the novelty of them is beginning to wear off.”

“Young Love,” an American play | on companionate marriage, has been banned by the English censor and all the critics agree with his decision Dorothy Gish played the lead in the i Arts Theatre production in London. ; but her acting did not impress a j critical audience.