The Play
Skinner, R. Dana
October 7, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL 537 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER The Vortex THIS play with which the much discussed Noel Coward has flashed into the American scene, exhibits a...
...He realizes that in his own way he is no better than his mother...
...The story will help to explain this point...
...the theatrical, that which gives life and emotional energy to certain specific scenes, and the dramatic, that which lends enduring value or significance to the play as a whole...
...It demands a correspondence to some great truth of life, without the obvious intervention of the dramatist's own theories...
...But due to her innocent indiscretions, he suspects that the child is not his own...
...The Vortex states a problem falsely, and then offers no solution...
...But in the meantime, Wanda has fallen deeply in love with Paul Lauzun, a Frenchman, and is about to marry him...
...Coward has injected into his play the theory that both mother and son are victims of "circumstances," of the "vortex of modern life which makes rottenness so easy...
...The Pelican A PROGRAM note to this play by F. Tennyson Jesse and H. M. Harwood reminds us that according to legend the pelican "will pluck her breast to feed her young with her own blood...
...He divorces her and takes legal proceedings to have the child declared illegitimate...
...There was room here to have broadened the grounds of Wanda's decision—a realization that even when she had been grievously wronged, the bond of marriage involved something more than the legal contract, that the welfare of the boy in its larger aspects was a duty transcending even personal pique and justifiable resentment...
...One feels on the whole that The Pelican is a fine opportunity lost through failure to give the central motivation its full quota of potential strength and soundness...
...To say that our particular modern life makes rottenness easy, is to give the lie to the testimony of centuries, which says that in all times and all conditions of mankind, it has been infinitely easier to fall than to rise...
...In fact, I have seldom seen a play illustrating with sharper outline the difference between these qualities...
...In this hour of crisis and mutual disclosure, what can they do to prevent catastrophe...
...It is not difficult to see that in this problem the motives of family tradition, social position and the honorableness of a British army career play an unduly heavy role, considering the matter purely in the human light...
...Florence Lancaster is a mother trying to retain her youth by the process of making much younger men fall in love with her...
...You would find the same quality if you overheard a street quarrel between a drunken husband and his wife...
...and here is where the play preaches a pessimism far beyond the testimony of human experience...
...Fred Kerr, as Robin's grandfather, General Sir John Heriot, gives the one really masterly interpretation of the play...
...The boy's resemblance to his father is now so striking that Marcus can no longer doubt his parentage, and horrified at his blunder, offers to remarry Wanda so as to give their son his rightful standing...
...But when Bunty blithely shifts her affections to Tom, and Nicky overhears the ensuing scene in which his mother debases herself by appealing to Tom to remain with her, the scales suddenly fall from his eyes...
...In the hands of good actors, they establish an emotional power of rare intensity...
...They have each made wrecks of their lives...
...As it stands, Wanda makes her sacrifice for the specific and sole purpose of gratifying her son's desire to enter a particular British military school...
...It has deliberately shifted the moral responsibility to unreality—to an imaginary being that simply has no separate moral existence— to society...
...At first he does not sense the full import of the situation...
...In the last act, Nicky comes to his mother's bedroom...
...But the dramatists have not chosen to broaden out the motive...
...He would have it that forces larger than themselves have conspired against them...
...Seventeen years later, Wanda's boy, Robin, returns to France, where his mother has been living, from a long visit in England, imbued with the idea that he must have a career in the English army...
...Unfortunately Mr...
...Boris Ranevsky plays the part of Paul Lauzun with considerable distinction and fine sensibility...
...This can only be obviated through special influence, and it so happens that the one man in England who can arrange it is Marcus, now General, Heriot...
...Obviously the close of the second act and the entire third act provide the emotional quality which makes splendid theatre...
...Neither character seeks from within the strength to start over again—because neither sees clearly that the beginning of the tragedy came from within...
...Forced to choose between disappointing her son or sacrificing her own immediate happiness, she gives up Lauzun and agrees to remarry Marcus...
...Her grown son, Nicky, returns with his fiancee, Bunty, from a long sojourn in Paris, to find his father a broken old man, and his mother an absurd figure, with dyed hair and artificially young manners, leading by a string a boy, Tom Veryan, no older than Nicky, himself...
...Marcus Heriot has married Wanda, and had one child by her...
...A play whose motivation is tacked down to the special conditions of a day—and falsely tacked down, at that—cannot hope to attain that universal importance which is the key to genuine dramatic power...
...The curtain falls on mother and son, in each others arms, blindly searching for strength, beseeching the help that neither is sure can be found from the other...
...But the theme upon which the dramatic importance of the whole play must rest is confused, inconclusive, and in one essential point, weak...
...He is not content to leave it that they are both weak-willed, and to let the catastrophe work itself out from that as a starting point...
...But genuine dramatic interest demands something more...
...So we have here a story constructed with something of the meticulous care of a Pinero, centering around the selfsacrifice of a mother to further her son's career...
...In this play Margaret Lawrence does some very effective acting but allows it to be marred at times by too much gesturing...
...Unfortunately, to enter one of the finer officers' schools, he must have a clear birth certificate...
...Nicky, it seems, has become a drug fiend...
...October 7, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL 537 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER The Vortex THIS play with which the much discussed Noel Coward has flashed into the American scene, exhibits a curious combination of theatrical strength with dramatic weakness...
...There mother and son face each other with their masks torn off...
...Several scenes in The Vortex have an extraordinarily fine theatrical quality...
...With Margaret Lawrence as the mother, and Fred Kerr delineating the character of an old English general with nothing less than flashing brilliancy, the play holds its audience well and moves with a refreshing sequence and cumulative effect...
Vol. 2 • October 1925 • No. 22
