“THE DEVIL”

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 928, 22 March 1930, Page 25

“THE DEVIL”

Benn Levy Writes a Morality Play BEYOND POWERS OF DRAMATIST The danger of modern morality plays is in their desire to have the best of both worlds and to pass without shock from the drawing-room carpets to the fields of Heaven. It is a desire not impossible of fulfilment, but needs the courage and genius of a Strindberg to fulful it; in the minds of lesser men it leads to disastrous timidity and compromise, writes an English critic. Recently there appeared at the Arts Theatre, with a cast so full of famous names that one felt as if one had come by mistake to a perRomance given by Royal command, a play called “The Devil,” by Benn Levy, in which one of the characters, outwardly a curate, has the appearance of Satan, but reveals himself in the last scene as an angel in disguise.

This play provides a good example of the fate of a great number of modern moralities. It begins firmly on earth, where Mr. Levy, a skilful and ingenious playwright, is very much at home. Magnus, a famous author, has brought to his rooms a young and beautiful girl. His pose is that of a professional egoist who thinks of nothing but his own comfort and pleasure, and we watch him angling for her. The brief dialogue between them, ending in the girl’s willing capitulation, is a brilliant one, sharp, clear, perceptive and amusing; the audience was delighted by it. But this opening scene was but a detachable prologue to the play itself. In Magnus’s country cottage, where the girl is living as his mistress, >we are introduced to a group of people—an actress, an author, a painter, a vicar and the vicar’s wife—who are all, except the vicar’s wife, ridden by some particular ambition. They sit down to play the old game in which every player is required to teil the truth. The curate of diabolical appearance presides. Each in turn is asked by him what he or she most wants in the world, and each ambition—for fame, for beauty, for applause, and so on—is confessed. No one except the vicar’s wife expresses a selfless wish. The devil thereupon proceeds by ingenious arrangements, half natural and half supernatural, to give eyery one an opportunity, at the price of secret dishonour or sin, to attain his heart’s desire. Every one is tempted; some even try to commit evil that their ambition may be satisfied; but all, in the end, turn away from evil; they are incapable of the vileuess or the meanness or the betrayal which at first seemed an irresistible temptation. The girl, though she wishes to run

away with a new lover, cannot bring herself to betray Magnus, and Magnus, though he is burning with desire to keep her, is driven by his conscience to set her free. The unsuccessful author, into whose hands the devil puts a secret masterpiece by Joseph Conrad, refuses to publish it under his own name, and the actress who, by a little uuscrupulousuess, might be given the opportunity that she most desires, puts the temptation from her. Then the devilish curate

reveals the moral of the play. “God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform” and has sent these temptations in order that the author, the actress and the rest may discover an unexpected strength and virtue in themselves.

The curate is a creature who lives in a supernatural half-light. He is intended to he a portentous figure and at the same time a man who does not unduly surprise his parishioners, who makes passionate love to the heroine, and whose uncle is a well-known Bishop. The combination of the two roles was beyond the powers of Dennis Neilson-Terry because it had first been beyond the powers of the dramatist. The curate, who should have been the key to the play, was always vague, acceptable neither as man nor angel. It follows that, in their relations with him all the other characters, though they were represented by such actors as Norman McKinnel, Ernest Thesiger, Sybil Thorndike and Jean Cadell. were unsatisfactory shadows struggling for an unattainable life.