"DADDALUMS."
This is a play about a Northampton shoe-manufacturer of Scottish
nationality. There is, of course, nothing quite like leather, and
I can well believe that the lucrative properties of the boot trade
(notwithstanding its alleged association with atheistic principles)
must at one time or other have attracted this prehensile race; yet I
doubt if Northampton, home of the cobbling industry, ever encouraged
a Scot to penetrate its preserves. Mr. LOUIS ANSPACHER, who wrote the
play, may have some inside knowledge denied to me, though his name
does not vividly indicate a Scots origin; but it is certain, if his
_Wallace Craigie_ really came from over the border, that he was
no true Scot, for his dialect showed obvious traces of Sassenach
pollution.
I have a mind that moves slowly and I hate to be hustled at the
opening of a play. I hate an author to plunge me into a whirl of
movement and a medley of characters as if he assumed that I was
intimate with circumstances known only to himself and his cast. I want
to be told, very quietly, where I am, and if he does not tell me I
become peevish. But, even if I hadn't been put off at the start, I
don't think my sympathies would ever have been very deeply engaged. I
soon saw that, whatever happened to anybody, I should easily bear
up. Mr. LOUIS CALVERT did all that was humanly possible to correct
my indifference, but his _Daddalums_ (as you might gather from such a
name) was not one of those heroic figures whose struggles against the
perversity of fate are apt to melt even the cold hearts of the gods
(Olympian). This old cobbler, suddenly grown rich, whose one ambition
was to make his son "_Tammas_" a gentleman (as he understood the
term), at any cost to the boy's soul, was asking for trouble from the
beginning. And when he got it I was far less sorry for the old fool
than I was pleased at the chances which this turn of fortune gave to
the versatility of Mr. CALVERT.
But the interest of the play lies not so much in the plot--worked
out mechanically, with one or two saving touches of ingenuity, to
a conventional conclusion--as in the character of this lovable old
boot-maker, whose single aim in life was to give his son the best that
money could buy. His heart, I think, began by being fairly large, but
got contracted through specialising in this passion. Snobbery is alien
to his nature, but he becomes a snob for _Tammas's_ sake. Stubborn and
domineering with others, he is as putty in the boy's hands. He has no
use for his other child--a girl. She, like himself, must be sacrificed
if it suits the young gentleman--as it did.
I won't say that any very nice psychological subtlety was needed
for the portrayal of a character whose ruling motive was so clearly
advertised, but it had its lights and shadows, responsive to changing
conditions, and Mr. CALVERT was quick to seize them all.
The boy's part was too unsympathetic to be played easily. But he had
one saving virtue; he never practised his snobbery on the old man who
encouraged it. He still called him "Daddalums," and that, I take it,
was what the papers would call an "acid test" of his piety. As his
fortunes declined Mr. LISTER rose to the occasion. The tighter the
corner the better he coped with it.
Mr. HENDRIE'S _Fergus McLarnie_, whose people must have migrated to
Northampton from the neighbourhood of Thrums, was an admirable crony;
but he insisted too much and too deliberately on a Scottish accent
that made for obscurity. In a broader vein Miss AGNES THOMAS played
the part of _Ellen, the Maid_ (another Scot), with a humour which even
an Englishman (like myself) found no difficulty in appreciating. Miss
EDYTH OLIVE, as the hero's neglected daughter, acted with a very nice
self-repression, which was all that could be expected of her rather
colourless part.
The first-night audience was very warm in its appreciation. Yet I
must doubt whether a play that is chiefly concerned with the
highly-developed paternity of a boot-manufacturer will make a very
poignant appeal to the sentiment of the public.
For one thing they may find the love-interest too sketchy. Of the
boy's two fiancees one was impossible, and the other (_Rose_) just a
perfunctory phantom that flitted vaguely from time to time across
the stage. She must have known it was a play of father and son, where
girls didn't really count. Poor _Rose_, so unassertive! How modestly
she kept herself in the background in that last scene where _Tammas_,
having "dreed his weird" (as they would say in Northampton) and
redeemed his past, comes back from Canada, flings himself into his
father's arms, remains there listening to a sustained exposition of
parental loyalty, and only after a considerable interval remarks the
presence of his future wife. She took it very well, but if I know
anything of the British public it won't be so easily pleased.