"The Darling of the Gods."
Though the Gallery, on the night when I attended, received it with rapt
interest rather than delirious enthusiasm, _The Darling of the Gods_
promises once more to justify its title. The play has undergone very
little modification since it was produced a decade ago. It remains pure
melodrama incidentally set in a Japanese dress, and sprinkled with a few
Japanese words. Here and there it may reproduce the Japanese attitude of
mind, as distinct from details of custom, but the general spirit of it
follows the traditional Anglo-Saxon lines. Anybody who knows no more of
Japan than may be gathered from the pages of LAFCADIO HEARN will at
least have learned that her youth is taught to regard the love-interest
of an ordinary English novel as an indecency; and so will recognise the
improbability of the romantic element in the play. Still, all that is of
little consequence, for there must have been very few who went to His
Majesty's to improve their acquaintance with comparative ethnology.
The play has pleasant things for the eye; and one of the best of them
was the face of Mr. GEORGE RELPH as _Kara_, leader of the Samurai. But
there were horrors, too; notably the senile amorousness of _Zakkuri_ and
the offensive little figure of _It_, his shadow--an interpolation in the
bill of fare. A properly qualified dwarf I might have welcomed; but this
precocious babe with the false moustache and the sham bald crown and the
cynical giggle, who ought to have been in the nursery instead of serving
his master with liquid stimulants and assisting in all sorts of
wickedness, was a peculiarly nauseating object, and got on my nerves far
more than the terrors of the torture-chamber. This painful business was
done off, and indeed most of the bloody work was carried on out of
sight--a curious economy in a play where there was so much talk of
lethal tools. It is true that an arrow once flopped on to the stage, but
it only brought a note from a friend's hand. Swords, too, were now and
then raised to strike, but were always arrested in mid-air. Even in the
last stand of the Samurai, where one might reasonably have hoped for
some hand-to-hand play, nothing happened except one fatal shot from an
unseen musket, and even then the stricken body fell into the wings. If
it hadn't been for the throttling of a spy and a touch or two of
hara-kiri in the dark of the Bamboo Forest we should have had
practically no corpses at all.
Sir HERBERT TREE was again the most likely exotic, and played his
revolting part with great gusto and a permissible amount of humour. Miss
MARIE LOeHR, whose delicate grace of feature and colouring lost something
by her dusky disguise, was sufficiently Japanese in the first scene, and
did the right twittering with her feet; but when the virgin
light-heartedness of _Yo-San_ was changed to tragic despair she mislaid
her Orientalism and reverted to her attractive English self. She brought
a true pathos into the scene where she is left out of mind by her lover,
to whom, at a pinch, all that is unfair to love was fair in war. I shall
never, by the way, quite understand how _Kara_ so far forgot his manners
and obligations as to threaten her with death for a betrayal to which he
owed his own life and with it the opportunity of killing her. With this
reservation, _Kara_ is a brave and noble figure, and Mr. RELPH made him
look like it.
I was disappointed that Mr. PHILIP MERIVALE should have had no better
chance than was afforded by the part of a dumb servant for the display
of that delightful personality which so shone in his _Cassio_ and his
_Doughty_; but he was quietly admirable in the most thrilling scene of
all--outside the Shoji of _Yo-San_. One missed the fine performance of
Miss HILDYARD as the outcast Geisha, with its suggestion of SADI YAKKO's
manner.
The play was again admirably mounted, and the final scene of reunion in
the clouds (reached after an interval where every minute, by Greenwich
time, was a hundred years) contrived to escape the banality which
commonly attends these transfigurations. I was glad, too, to observe
that, in the code of etiquette which prevails in "the first Celestial
Heaven," the European habit of osculation is recognised; though it seems
that you have to go through a very hell of a time before you get to it.