"The Barton Mystery."
One of the most difficult feats of juggling is, I understand, the deft
tossing up and catching of a heavy weight (say a dumb-bell), a very
light weight, such as a champagne cork, together with any old thing of
irregular shape, a bedroom candlestick, for instance. Mr. WALTER
HACKETT'S _The Barton Mystery_ is a most ingenious turn of this sort.
The _fiancé_ of the sister of the wife of _Richard Standish, M.P._, is
under sentence of death for the murder of _Mr. Barton_. He happens to be
innocent, though he admits at the trial that he quarrelled violently
with and even threatened _Barton_ on the night of the murder, and his
revolver has been found by the dead man's side. That vindictive relict,
_Mrs. Barton_, is holding back some material evidence which could save
the condemned man, or so _Standish_ thinks, and she is adamant. Now
_Barton_ was unquestionably a bad egg, but the widow doesn't want the
whole world to know it--at least not till she finds the woman. Some
woman, who had incidentally written some, shall we say, very impetuous
love letters, is being shielded. Who is she? Is it _Standish's_ wife,
for instance? Ah!... This is the dumb-bell.
A _Lady Marshall_, the wife of a _Sir Everard Marshall_, a comic
scientist in perpetual flight from his overwhelming spouse, is one of
the sort that finds a new religion every few months and is now in the
first fast furious throes of her latest, which is some form of
psychomania, whereof the high priest is one _Beverley_, a plausible
ringletted charlatan of alcoholic tendencies (_Sludge the Medium_,
without his cringe and snarl), who ekes out his spasmodic visitations of
genuine psychic illumination with the most shameless spoof. This is the
cork.
The candlestick is the dream _motif_, always a ticklish business to
handle, and in this particular case--well, no, I won't be such a
spoil-sport as to go into that, for the chief pleasure of this kind of
an entertainment is the succession of pleasant unexpected shocks which
are deftly administered to the audience by the author.
There were times indeed when the latter nearly dropped his
dumb-bell--times when it was in imminent peril of barging into the cork;
and most certainly the candlestick very nearly slipped out of his hand.
But it just didn't, so you will see that it was really a most
exceptional piece of jugglery. Of course I will admit you have to
swallow the robust assumption that into a household over which the
shadow of death in its ugliest form hovers so threateningly two fatuous
people, to wit the scientist and his wife, can come and babble about
their own trivial domestic troubles or their latest philosophy of life.
But then mystery plays always are like that, and this is a jolly good
one of its kind--a kind which it pains me, as a superior person, to
confess that I liked enormously.
[Illustration: THE MEDIUM AND THE PALMIST.
_Beverley_ ... Mr. H. B. Irving.
_Sir Everard Marshall_ ... Mr. Holman Clark.]
Mr. H. B. IRVING as the preposterous _Beverley_ was in his very best
form. _Beverley_ is really a creation. How much the author's and how
much the player's it would be an impertinence to inquire. This
imperturbable trickster with his thin streak of genuine sensitiveness to
psychic influence; his grotesquely florid style--the man certainly has
style; his frank reliance on apt alcohol's artful aid; his cadging
epicureanism; his keen eye for supplementary data for his inductions and
prophecies; his cynical candour when detected, is presented to us with
Mr. IRVING'S rich-flavoured and most whimsical sense of comedy, with all
his exuberant abundance of gracious or fantastic gesture and resourceful
business. In the trances, sometimes real, sometimes simulated, he gives
you a plausible sketch of how a modicum of psychic power (whatever that
may be), laced with whisky neat, might colour a séance. Mr. _Hackett_,
by way of showing that he has not ignored the literature of his subject,
has adapted from the admirable, but, I regret to say, entirely
untrustworthy, because incurably original, MAETERLINCK an entirely new
definition of psychometry. But we certainly will not go into that.
Mr. HOLMAN CLARK as the sceptical _Sir Everard_, completely spoofed by
_Beverley_ in the end, with an elaborate make-up ruthlessly reminding us
of our simian ancestry, potters cleverly about the stage with that
admirable and amiable craft which he has at such easy command. Miss
MARIE ILLINGTON as _Lady Marshall_, the seeker after light, kept the
burlesquerie of her part skilfully within bounds--indeed this matter of
key was extraordinarily well handled by the three players entrusted with
what I have ventured to call the cork _motif_.
As to the more serious business, Mr. H. V. ESMOND seemed to behave very
much as one would imagine a decent M.P. behaving in such embarrassing
circumstances. He suspected his wife with all the ardour which public
men on the stage always exhibit. His little turn of desperate tragedy
carried conviction--almost too much conviction, as you will find--but I
won't explain.
Miss JESSIE WINTER, as his wife, very adroitly contrived an ambiguous
effect of likely guilt but possible innocence. She more than fulfils the
promise of her last performance in this theatre, but she must (may I
tell her?) arrest the development of "the Fatal Cæsura," that
exasperating histrionic device whereby every salient phrase is broken up
for no conceivable reason into two halves. In the secondary stages there
is but slender hope of a cure; in the tertiary there is none.
Miss DARRAGH was, as required, the vindictive widow to the life (this
kind of life, you understand), and Miss HILDA BAYLEY played very
charmingly the little wilful _fiancée_ who--but no, I must keep my
promise.
With much less evidence than the applause and generally keyed-up
attitude of the Savoy audience afforded me, I could risk a psychic
communication in the authentic manner of a Beverley séance. "All is
dark.... It is getting light.... I see a man.... He leans eagerly to a
telephone.... He thrusts something into envelopes. He goes on thrusting
things into envelopes. The telephone keeps ringing.... It is.... Can it
be? Yes, it _is_ a Box Office." An institution which at the Savoy should
be busy for many months to come.