"FELIX GETS A MONTH."
This "whimsical comedy," made by Mr. LEON M. LION out of a novel by
the late TOM GALLON, began in a distinctly intriguing mood. _Felix_
had an uncle, a sport, on whom he had once played a scurvy practical
joke. This highly tolerant victim eventually cut up for a round
million, which he left to nephew _Felix_ on condition that he should
enter Umberminster as naked as the day he was born and earn his living
therein for a full calendar month--a palpable posthumous hit to the
old man. _Felix_ accordingly, equipped as laid down in the will, is
left by the family solicitor in a wood, and, after a night and a day
in hiding, appears shivering at the Mayor's parlour window, abstracts
a rug for temporary relief, and prevails upon the maid, a romantic
little orphan (who had been reading about river-gods and mistakes
_Felix_ for one), to borrow a suit of the Mayor's clothes--into which
he gets in time to interview that worthy when he returns with his grim
lady. "You'll get a month," says she with damnable iteration; and the
resourceful _Felix_, with an eye to the whimsical will, whimsically
suggests that justice would be better fulfilled by his putting in the
month at the Mayor's house as odd-job man than by his being conveyed
to the county jail. And the Mayor whimsically agrees.
After that, I regret to say, honest whimsicality took wing, and the
show became merely--shall we say?--eupeptic. And certainly a much more
elaborate meal than my lord DEVONPORT allowed me would be required to
induce a mood sufficiently tolerant to face without impatience the
welter which followed. The three incredible people--mercenary virgin,
heavy father and aimless smiling villain--that walked straight out of
the Elephant and Castle into the Second Act were not, I suspect, any
elaborate (and quite irrelevant) joke of the actor-author's at the
expense of the transpontine method, but just queer puppets brought on
to disentangle the complications, though I confess I half thought that
the villain, Mr. LAWRENCE LEYTON, was pulling our legs with a quite
deliberate burlesque. On the whole I am afraid this play is but
another wreck on that old snag of the dramatised novel.
But there were plenty of isolated good things, such as Mr. O.B.
CLARENCE'S really excellent Mayor, puzzled, pompous, eagle-pecked.
Miss FLORENCE IVOR, the eagle in question, gave a shrewd and shrewish
portrait of a wife gey ill to live with. Mr. REGINALD BACH'S very
entertaining imaginary portrait of a faithful boy scout was a stroke
of genius, his "call of the wild" being by far the best whim of the
evening. Miss EVA LEONARD-BOYNE as _Ninetta_, the orphan, did her
little job tenderly and prettily, but I couldn't believe in _Ninetta_
in that galley, and I doubt if she did. Mr. GORDON ASH was the
debonair hero. I do most solemnly entreat him to consider the example
of some of the elders in his profession who have adopted a laugh as
their principal bit of business. It may turn into a millstone. Was he
not laughing the same laugh on this very stage in a very different
part three days ago? He was. If he got a month, laugh-barred, he would
profit by the sentence. For he has jolly good stuff in him.