NEW WAR PLAY

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 986, 31 May 1930, Page 26

NEW WAR PLAY

“Suspense” is Brutal But Magnificent SUPERB ACTING “Suspense” is brutal and terrible but magnificent. This is how a London critic describes Patrick Mac Gill’s war play—the latest to be presented in London. We see a party of men in a captured German dug-out, we hear the tap-tap-tap of the German miners, and we share the agonised suspense of the men waiting and wondering whether the mine will explode beneath them and blow them sky-high, writes Alan Parsons in the “Daily Mail.” There is Scruffy (Gordon Marker), the sublime and immortal Cockney, knitting his sock and undoing it, Pene-lope-wise, when finished, with his unconquerable humour, sturdy and steadfast, the kind that really won the war; Alleiulia Brett (Oswald Dale Roberts), with his strange evangelist streak; Lomax, the everlasting Irish grouser (Sidney Morgan); and Pettigrew (Robert Douglas), the 18-year-old gentleman-ranker, who loses his nerve under the strain and is arrested for deserting his post. Stark Realism And through all the terror this little band sings its weird songs—the new verson of “Tipperary” must be heard to be believed —till at the supreme moment, when it seems the mine must explode, relief comes. The third act finds them resting behind the lines. In the distance the mine goes off—it is the signal for a general attack, and, instead of the calm they had hoped to find they are once again in the midst of the battle, without cover, without reserves, without stretcher-bearers—hopelessly lost. My attention was gripped from the rise of the curtain to the fall; in stark realism it is even more brutal than “Journey’s End,” but through it all runs an insuperabel spirit of comradeship. a sense of humour that no horrors can dim. Superb Acting Once again it is proved that fine plays produce fine acting, but there are two superb performances—those of Mr. Marker and Mr. Morgan. Mr. Marker’s broad cockney humour leavens the whole tragic story; his unbreakable spirit is symbolised by that sock which is never finished, while Mr. Morgan shows liow the Army was allowed to keep up its spirit by an unchecked flow of grousing. He would rather “sit on an incubator of rattlesnakes,” yet he sticks it out, and is indeed the last to leave the doomed dug-out. The Censor has been amazingly sparing in the use of the official blue pencil, and very rightly, for such a tale in bowdelrised language would mean less than nothing.