• U.S.

The Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Jan. 20, 1930

4 minute read
TIME

Children of Darkness. History is apt to make the ladies of bygone centuries seem lovelier than our own. and the scamps of other times appear far more appealing in their outrageousness than contemporary racketeers. Playwright Edwin Justus Mayer (The Firebrand), always partial to historical gloss, has developed his newest play from suggestions given by the late great Novelist Henry Fielding in History of the Life of the late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great. The scene is laid in the house of Mr. Snap, gaoler of London’s Newgate Prison, in the year 1725. It is Mr. Snap’s custom to invite to his home as heavily paying guests the more affluent and well-favored of the criminals in his charge. Thus, when the play begins, the company includes the paunchy rascal Jonathan Wild, a decadent nobleman calling himself Count La Ruse, and one Cartwright, a callow poet incarcerated for debt.

The last two pay court to the gaoler’s daughter, Laetitia, a disturbing and extremely decollete presence in this penumbrous house. The poet learns some of the less poetical things about women when La Ruse’s carnality triumphs over his own romanticizing. But even La Ruse feels it necessary to escape the unhealthy witchery of Laetitia, which he does by suicide; not, however, before he has affectionately given young Cartwright enough money to pay his debts. Meanwhile Jonathan Wild is taken out and hanged, and an elegant, periwigged Lord, the poisoner of his wife and most of his relatives, arrives to placate Laetitia.

Mary Ellis’s Laetitia is an exciting and frightening creation; Basil Sydney’s La Ruse is morbid and passionate; the lesser parts are splendidly done. Yet only in the last act do these characters produce the witty, sardonic tensions which you expect of them. The early moments of the play remain listless while Playwright Mayer’s dialog is getting up momentum. Waterloo Bridge. Close by Waterloo railway station in London is a bridge upon whose parapet are posted sooty little strumpets waiting for soldiers returning home on leave. A German air raid sends them scurrying to their rooms and Myra, chubby and scarlet-shirtwaisted, goes with: a slim fellow who proves to be incredibly cherubic for one who has served with the Canadian expeditionary forces. He used to be a Y.M.C.A. man. Not only does he fail to recognize Myra’s profession, but he is not even intuitively wary. In that one evening he conceives the idea that she should marry him.

At about this point you begin to feel sure that Myra will desert her lover rather than pollute him, that he will ultimately learn the truth and ignore it, that she will then promise to be a good girl until he returns from the wars with a marriage license. The playwright who has done nothing to disturb these expectations is Robert Emmet Sherwood, usually devoted not to emotional ferments but to the risabilities (The Road to Rome, The Queen’s Husband). The very modest measure of success that he achieves with this sentimentally serious play is largely due to June Walker and to Glenn Hunter, still boyishly telescoping his words. Between them these two occasionally suggest a forlorn, tender reality.

So Was Napoleon. Not even the presence of droll, blinking Hugh O’Connell. famed for his portrayal of alcoholics (Gentlemen of the Press, Week End), can remove from the category of weak farce this tale of an ignoramus from Syracuse, N. Y., whose fatuous course leads him to fortune and the favors of a French countess. It would be idle to deny that Mr. O’Connell causes some hilarious moments, but they occur between expanses of repartee like the following: “Did you use dikes on the barge canal?” “No, we just used a large bunch of Italians.”

More Must-Reads from TIME

Contact us at letters@time.com