"THOSE WHO SIT IN JUDGMENT."
In days of great national tension the public needs some coaxing to be
got into the theatre at all. Our managers should either, at the risk of
appearing callous, offer us a pure distraction from the strain of things
or else provide something in harmony with the emotions of the time. But
frankly I cannot find in the programme at the St. James's any apparent
sign of consideration for present conditions. It is true that it
supplies excellent entertainment for Mr. GEORGE ALEXANDER, who has
plenty of occupation in a part that suits him well. But I was thinking,
selfishly enough, of my own needs and those of other non-combatants.
I admit that the scene in West Africa was a diverting novelty. I had
never before, to my recollection, met a native monarch from the Gold
Coast, and I have pleasure in accepting the assurance of Mr. CROWTHER,
Secretary for Native Affairs in this district, that they are like that.
But it was impossible to feel any very deep concern as to what might
happen to the damaged hero (_Michael Trent_) on his return to England
after the failure of his rubber schemes. The best he could hope for, by
way of consolation for being misunderstood, was to become a
co-respondent in a suit brought by the chief sitter-in-judgment. Even so
we might have contrived a little sympathy if the woman's fifth-rate
environment had not made any community of tastes hopelessly improbable.
For her, too, it seemed to us a poor business that the only
encouragement she could offer him in the undeserved ruin of his career
was to get it blasted all over again--and this time on a true charge--by
running away with him.
But the rubber-man in the play was never a hero. There in his Gold Coast
shanty we see his lover's young brother dying of fever under his eyes.
Yet from the moment when he himself gets a touch of the same complaint
he takes to brandy, and practically loses all further interest--at any
rate of a coherent kind--in the fate of his _protege_. And at the
end--though he seems to take a good deal of personal pride in the
prospect--the only heroism that lies before him is the living-down of a
sordid scandal in the divorce-court.
As _Michael Trent_, Mr. GEORGE ALEXANDER played excellently, and I have
nothing to say against either the quality or the quantity of his work,
except that in the First Act the tale of his experience in the Beresu
forest, which began with a very natural air, developed into something
like a recitation. He might almost have been Mr. ROOSEVELT, in a mood of
exaltation, describing his river to the Geographical Society. That
clever actress, Miss HENRIETTA WATSON, had to play a difficult part as
_Trent's_ lover, in a vein that, I think, is new to her. She did it
well, though she seemed to start on a note of intensity which left her
too little margin for the time when she really needed it; her appeal,
too, was rather to our intelligence than our hearts. Mr. NIGEL PLAYFAIR,
waiving his gift of deliberate humour, showed himself a master of the
petty meannesses of a certain phase of suburban banality. Mr. VOLPE
presided, with the right rotundity of a rubber company's chairman, over
a very spirited meeting of indignant share-holders. And, finally,
nothing became Mr. REGINALD OWEN so well as the manner of his dying.