The Play
Skinner, R. Dana
508 THE COMMONWEAL September 30, 1925 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER The Green Hat KATHARINE CORNELL has returned to New York at last, bringing Michael Arlen's The Green Hat with her. Of...
...This delicious satire on the self-deceptive heroics of war—and on heroics of all sorts, so far as that goes—is one of the few Shaw plays you can accept and enjoy without reservations...
...Arlen, then, has painted in his play the portrait of a tragic failure, important only as all self-created tragedies are important, and in no wise kindled with the spark of greatness...
...nearly approaching iroism, only to find it smothered by her own impotence...
...Arms and the Man could be set with equal appropriateness in the Luxembourg of 1914, in the Athens of several hundred B.C., in the Egypt of Cleopatra or the District of Columbia, 1918...
...What a drama this might have been, if Iris had raised her ove for Napier many degrees higher by never seeking to make u'm her own...
...the former, she betrays on the same occasion by telling it to Napier himself...
...It is all the easier for me to consider the play by itself, as I have never read the book—and quite possibly never shall read it...
...Knowing that fine comedy demands superlative acting, the Guild has assembled, for the revival of this young classic, an exceptional cast...
...Arlen had to give (which is very little) and much more beside...
...She is a profoundly unhappy woman, forever eking and never finding inner strength...
...But to le end, her self-love exceeds any power of will or self-sacrifice le can summon...
...The latter, she gratifies three days before his marriage to Venice Pollen...
...or, if that temptation had proved beyond the lower of her will, had she kept "Boy's" secret to the end of er days...
...War, warfare and whereabouts are all accidents...
...She has pitched the moral importance of Iris far too high, too near the pinnacle to which her own personal ideals would leap...
...But I do not think you will find the delighted audiences at the Guild theatre agreeing with them, and for a very good reason...
...In a sense, this is an imperfection in her art...
...Arlen has fashioned...
...She has, it is true, thinned out her own womanliness to a remarkable degree, but not to the degree indicated by the playwright...
...Here you have the start of a theme of quixotic self-sacrifice emerging from a character otherwise selfindulgent and essentially selfish...
...When Shaw strikes at a human weakness—and there are moments when no one can strike with swifter certainty—it is never at a weakness of the day or generation only...
...He prods and goads universal weaknesses...
...If the play is ever presented with another actress, you will, I am sure, hear people discussing two distinct characters, the Iris of Mr...
...I entered the Broadhurst theatre with no preconceived visions and found—a rather loosely and at times very poorly constructed play wound about a theme which might have been poignantly beautiful, but which missed both beauty and song by that vast space which separates the right from the left hand slope of a mountain crest...
...In the course of her notorious career, Iris guards but two treasures—this secret of Fenwick's death, and her love for Napier Harpenden...
...To save Fenwick's reputation before the world, and particularly before her weak-willed brother, to whom "Boy" had been an idol and inspiration, Iris makes it known that he killed himself because of shock at discovering her own past...
...Either act would have brought Iris to a certain moral nportance...
...The romantic Raina of Miss Lynn Fontanne is crisp and delectable—nothing less—and fittingly matched against the precise common sense of Alfred Lunt, as the chocoSeptember 30, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL...
...Arlen certainly never endowed it...
...But if this is an imperfection, it errs at least on the creative side...
...She then drives her car headlong into a tree, the quicker to end her own intolerable existence...
...It is seldom that the lukewarm sinner becomes the heroic saint...
...Arlen's lines say one thing (rather cheaply, too...
...But when she finds that he is not great enough to keep the secret which she herself had not kept, she sends him back to Venice, by telling him the lie that Venice is about to have a child...
...For this reason, she is simply—unimportant...
...Arms and the Man THE Theatre Guild season has opened abruptly and charmingly with a revival of Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man...
...Iris had planned, with the sad-eyed consent of poor Venice, to leave England forever with Napier...
...Arlen, and the Iris that shared also the imaginative power and the humane sympathy of Katharine Cornell...
...for Iris subsequently gives herself, though not her love, to many men for the mere sake of being loved...
...Some of our critics have laboriously and most tiresomely tried to prove that since the advent of What Price Glory?, Shaw's satire is somewhat demoded and thin...
...She makes you believe, for the moment, in the importance of Iris Fenwick in spite of all that your reason can say to the contrary...
...Where the will is dormant, it generally leaves the valleys as well as the heights unexplored...
...His theme is simply the futility and nonsense of self-deception...
...I should say that by the self same token by which Iris informs us that she is not really bad, that she "only misbelieves," she also confesses that she cannot be really fine or noble...
...Arlen's play is a weakling, with magnificent impulses far beyond her power of achievement...
...This great artist of our stage has written into the play a beauty, a richness and an importance with which Mr...
...Not so, however, with the living impersonation of Iris as sublimated by Miss Cornell...
...Miss Cornell's presence, her movements, her gestures, even her silences, convey another...
...For the moment, let us assume that the play's the thing, and see what sort of a drama Mr...
...Stripped of all glamor, the Iris of Mr...
...Of her exceedingly fine acting—so fine that for the first time, I lost the delight of seeing Miss Cornell in the greater satisfaction of seeing the new and vivid character she had created—I shall say more presently...
...Here you have Iris March, conscious of a neurotic and erratic inheritance, thwarted in the only real love of her life by prejudice and parental interference, married to "Boy" Fenwick because he loves her so intensely, only to discover that he was physically unfit to marry and to have him commit suicide on their bridal night...
...From then on, her life is perpetual retribution, beginning with the still-birth of her child, and ending with her disillusionment in Napier himself, when, in a well meant effort to justify her before the world, he tells his father and a group of friends the truth about Fenwick...
...She gives all that Mr...
...would have given her a faint claim to be numered among the great romantic heroines of the drama...
Vol. 2 • September 1925 • No. 21
