STRONG DRAMA

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1064, 30 August 1930, Page 24

STRONG DRAMA

“Long Shadows" and Sex Psychology “SAD AND BAD AND MAD’’

1 think it was A. B. Walkley who once ended a notice of some Teutonic profundity on sex with “How sad and bad and mad it was, but oh how it was psychological!” writes Ivor Brown, a London critic, on “Long Shadows” by Philip Johnson. A visit to Mr. Johnson’s, Derbyshire, might have caused him to make similar comment. For things turn sad and mad indeed on Mr. Shirley’s moorland farm where the accents are often more of Kensington than of the Cat and Fiddle countryside, while the conduct of the young lady of the house suggests the nightmares natural to fanciers of Strindberg. Mr. Johnson has got hold of a good dramatic theme, but he is not yet a strong enough dramatist to control it; it runs away with him and lands his players in some terribly difficult country. The idea is the effect on a young woman of puritanical upbringing when she discovers that her husband has had a brief lapse of infidelity; the loss of her faith in him becomes the loss of all continuity in her character. She, too, will be different; she, too, will be wanton. She passes into a grim, self-conscious abandonment and tortures an innocent farm-lad whom she does not care about in the least by spurring him into a tumult of calf-love. The repressions of her girlhood flower in the hideou3 cruelty of womanhood. For her husband, who is a simple sentimentalist, she has nothing now but contempt.

SMACKS OF THEORY When her plough-boy victim is killed in jumping out of her window, she determines that, as she has begun, so she must continue. The family has called her, and with reason, filthy names; she may as well earn them. The complete collapse of character under stress of a single shock has the smack of theory rather than of life. But there is nothing too strange to find inclusion in the text-books of sexual psychology. Where nothing is impossible it is idle to accuse the dramatist of building on that which is improbable. Mr. Johnson is relentless with his theme, and, as far as the situations are concerned, uses it with power and with passion. He begins with one of those little accidents which breed immense calamity', the kind that Thomas Hardy was apt to seize upon •too greedily as the foundation for tragedy otherwise beyond criticism. Young Andy Shirley, a sailor, has Just married Loo Lindrop. of the Derbyshire farm: we see him in a tropical port; his grosser companions have had letters from home. His, by a chance, has not arrived. He hates their har hour manners, but in chagrin at not hearing from his wife, and, undei fascinating challenge from a young person in yellow, abandons his usua self-discipline and joins the sordid revel. It is not a good scene and th< young ladies of the harbour seemed tc have been discovered in the Hawaiiai episode of a revue.

WEAKNESS FOR SYMBOLISM And so to Derbyshire. Andy is back and will settle down to be a farmer. Loo, his wife, is happy, but Andy has a queasy conscience and is only too eager to blurt out his adventure with the charmer in yellow. Theu everything snaps in Loo; she suffers her shock-change into something rich and strange and uncommonly unpleasant. She, too, will wear yellow (Mr. Johnson has a weakness for unimpres-

sive symbolism), and she will tread firmly in those paths of infidelity where her husband had nervously stumbled. The only available victim is a pleasant farm-lad as innocent as the garden-gate. If he lacks the pluck of his passion, a couple of glasses of grocer's port may serve as ploughboy’s ruin. He is seduced and they are discovered; he tries to escape by the window, falls, and is killed. The worthy Andy would try to patch up the fragments of stained-glass sanctity that once had been his wife. But she knows better —or worse. There is to be no nonsense about starting again. She has lost all her past with her faith in him, iuid she has no further interest in stained glass. Mr. Johnson has raised some good drama in his postulate of a woman’s character that snaps in a second. In many ways his piece has large promise. But his dialogue makes life cruelly difficult for the actors. They have to paddle about in sloppy symbolism and a welter of poetaster's English. Two characters are kept firmly on Derbyshire soil, the mother of Andy and the mother of the ploughboy. They are superbly played by Margaret Yards and Una O'Connor. j