Our Theatres In The Nineties - Vol II

OUR THEATRES IN THE NINETIES BY BERNARD SHAW IN THREE VOLUMES VOLUME II LONDON CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LIMITED Revised anJ reprinted for this Standard Edition 1932 Reprinted 1948 All rights fully protected and reserved PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY R. R. CLARK, LIMITED, EDINBURGH These criticisms were contributed week by week to THE SATURDAY REVIEW from January 1895 to May 1898 OUR THEATRES IN THE NINETIES NEW YEAR DRAMAS A WOMANS REASON. By Charles H. E. Brookfield and F. C. Philips. Shaftesbury Theatre, 27 December 1895. THE LATE MR CASTELLO. A new and original farce in three acts. By Sydney Grundy. Comedy Theatre, 28 December 1895. 4 January 1896 IT was such pleasure to see Mr Lewis Waller and his company divested of the trappings of Manxmanity and in their right minds again, that we all received A Womans Reason with more gaiety and enthusiasm than can easily be justified in cold blood. The play has been produced, as far as I can guess, by the following process. One of the authors, whom I take to be Mr Philips, wrote a commonplace Froufrou play, in a style so conscientiously and intolerably literary that the persons of the drama do not hesi tate to remark familiarly to their nearest and dearest that Con vention speaks one thing, whilst some sweeter voice whispers another. The sweeter voice in the composing of the play, I assume, was Mr Brookfields. Mr Brookfield is an assiduous col lector of conversational jcux d esprit, and is witty enough to be able to contribute occasionally to the museum himself. Such a collection, from its very miscellaneousness, is better for ordinary theatrical purposes than a complete philosophy reduced to aphor isms and by sticking its plums into Mr Philipssliterary dough with reckless profusion, Mr Brookfield has produced a sufficiently toothsome pudding. The worst of it is that the Brookfieldian plums digest and are forgotten, whilst the Philipian suet remains heavy on soul and stomach. I cannot now remember a single one of Mr Brookfields sallies, not even the one in which I recognized a long-lost child of my own. On the other hand, I do recollect, with a growing sense of injury, the assumption that the relation between a British officer and a cultivated Jewish gentleman who makes a trifle of VOL. II J B OUR THEATRES IN THE NINETIES seventy thousand a year or so in the City is the relation between Ivanhoe and Isaac of York, with its offensiveness somewhat accentuated by modern snobbery. When Captain Crozier pro ceeded to explain haughtily to Mr Stephen DAcosta that it was useless for two persons in their respective conditions to discuss a question of honor, as they could not possibly understand one another, I seemed to hear a voice from my boyhood the voice of Howard Paul singing Im Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines And I feed my horse on kidney beans Of course it far exceeds the means Of a captain in the army. It is to this rustic conception of a captain in the army that we owe Crozier. And yet would you believe it the perform ance at the Shaftesbury leaves one with a stronger sense of the reality of Captain Crozier than of any other person in the drama. This is largely due, no doubt, to Mr Coghlan, who, having given himself a complete rest from acting during his assumption of the part of Mercutio at the Lyceum, now resumes it at the Shaftesbury with all the vigor of a man who has had a thorough holiday. I do not say that Mr Coghlanseffects are made with the utmost economy of time and weight but then it is perfectly in the character of the part and in the interest of the drama that Captain Crozier should be a comparatively slow, heavy person, in contrast to the keen, alert Jew...