The Play
Skinner, R. Dana
16 THE COMMONWEAL November 10, 1926 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER Caponsacchi WALTER HAMPDEN has given New York audiences in Caponsacchi everything which he failed to provide in The...
...Those who regard the stage purely as a laboratory of art and ignore its social influences answer yes...
...Autumn Fire IN THIS strong play of Irish country life, by T. C. Murray, with its skilful study of destructive jealousy, John L. Shine and his Irish players have brought a new note of sincerity to Broadway...
...In the quality of Caponsacchi's devotion to Pompilia, one finds nothing less than the theme of Dante and Beatrice or of Saint Francis and the Lady Clare...
...But the play gains quickly in power from then on, not forgetting its side excursions into native wit and character...
...In the role of Caponsacchi, Mr...
...The evidence is obscure...
...She resents his attempts to appear young because she sees in his advancing age an increasing dependence on her help...
...Her Pompilia is memorable—poignant, simple, charged with exquisite and restrained beauty...
...Guido follows, and by bribing the landlord of an inn, obtains perjured evidence against his wife and Caponsacchi...
...In his last scene of confession and terror—his only real chance—he does admirably...
...The theme of the play, as arranged by Arthur Goodrich and Rose A. Palmer, concerns a priest of Arezzo toward the end of the seventeenth century, who risks his life to save from torture and slow death the young wife of Count Guido Fran-ceschini...
...She hovers ominously over the action of the entire play, seeking in every base suspicion a justification for her warnings and her actions...
...Why this new dramatization of Robert Browning's poem, The Ring and the Book, was not selected for the first Hampden production of the season must remain a mystery...
...The telling of this story is fraught with many dangers...
...The scenic arrangements of Claude Bragdon are, as always, interesting and beautiful examples of variety with a great economy of material...
...At the close of Caponsacchi's narrative, we are taken back to the court scene...
...He takes his characters as they are and lets them do their best or their worst...
...The Pope conceals himself...
...Bit by bit the truth behind the slanders of Guido unfolds...
...Pretending that the child is not his own, he comes to her home, murders her parents and then orders his men to kill Pompilia herself...
...Murray wastes little time in moralizing...
...The Pope is lamenting the fact that the written evidence alone does not disclose enough...
...The sight of the havoc disease has wrought may only create a morbid fear which makes recovery almost impossible...
...In the end, it is her insinuations that bring the tragedy to a swift conclusion by pitting father against son...
...In the case of some forms of moral degeneracy, the theatre can have, psychologically, precisely the same destructive effect, not so much through creating fear as through increasing morbid discussion and curiosity...
...In the second place, Mr...
...The theatre offers the world's best study in mass psychology...
...At all events, it is a superb piece of artistry...
...If the play manages to hold its integrity of feeling in spite of this, it is because of the complete ascendency of the main theme which blots out the crudity of the Guido portrayal...
...As a play, it is incomparably better than The Immortal Thief, and as an acting part for Mr...
...Once more, Guido and Caponsacchi are brought before the papal court...
...Two points, however, are generally left out of consideration...
...Surely a mordant character and yet, because sincerely drawn, not without sympathy...
...Many months later, he learns that Pompilia has had her child...
...The court summons Caponsacchi...
...It might, and quite probably will do incalculable harm...
...He tells them that he will try to make Pompilia live again before their eyes...
...But nothing could be handled with more fearless beauty than this theme of a spiritual love rising to heroic heights...
...It is for this artistry of characterization that Mr...
...Without going quite so far as this, The Captive, as both its French and English titles suggest, intimates that the guilt of its chief character is beyond the power of will to control...
...The intense dramatic suspense of this narrative is well maintained by the device of opening the play a moment before the trial...
...Then the play begins...
...Caponsacchi's story possible, but in the opinion of the court, unlikely...
...But this does not meet Guido's purpose...
...Without summoning the fanatics, it is quite certain that no general good can possibly come from a play with the subject matter of The Captive...
...If you are "to hold the mirror up to nature," they say, "you cannot exclude part of nature...
...Its audiences cannot be controlled like the attendance at a medical clinic, so that its effects must be judged, not in relation to mature groups, but to all those who can and will pay the price of admission...
...Ernest Rowan, as Count Guido, suffers the handicap of playing a part without any gradations, too utterly black for belief, and with many exceedingly awkward entrances and exits...
...The jealous daughter is, in fact, one of the most vivid portraits on our stage this season, not only by grace of Miss O'Connor's superb acting, but also by reason of the stark and smouldering ferocity of her lines...
...But when he learns that Pompilia is to have a child, and that her only hope of safety is to flee to her family in Rome, he arranges for her escape and accompanies her as a knight-protector on her journey...
...Unfortunately for their argument, as any good physician knows, it is not always well to ask a sick patient to look at himself in the mirror...
...Born to poverty of looks as well as of mind, and left to the mercy of her misguided instincts, she has centered her whole satisfaction in life on the care of her aging father...
...Perhaps that is why he has put into it that same surge of feeling and emotion which has made his Cyrano up to now his finest achievement...
...The only criticism one might bring against it is in the handling of Count Guido...
...In a generally excellent cast, the work of Una O'Connor as the morbidly jealous daughter and of Mr...
...If so dark a villain ever lived, he is quite beyond ordinary human experience...
...Miss Edith Barrett, of his permanent company, must share with him a place of high honor...
...Hampden has, in fact, another Cyrano—a love that gains majesty through its complete self-denial...
...He has seen Pompilia once and read in her eyes a rare beauty of soul...
...One understands her even while condemning her...
...He insists upon riding a vicious horse—he must show off before his intended young bride...
...Here we have a man of noble birth, destined by his family for the priesthood, who has at once the instincts of the cavalier and adventurer and the whole-souled determination to live up to his vows and to attain the spiritual stature which, under other circumstances, he might never have reached...
...The play more than deserves the very favorable reviews it has received in the general press...
...Instead, it comes as the direct result of his own headstrong desire to prove his youthful vigor...
...This, like many other touches in the play, is what gives it its feeling of authenticity and removes it at once from the myriad plays which scratch only the surface of character...
...He has them both arrested and brought before a papal court which sends Pompilia back to her parents and Caponsacchi to prison...
...Hampden again in Caponsacchi than in Cyrano...
...It would have been quite possible to effect the breakdown and last illness of the father through some unexpected accident...
...The second, and more important, is whether the subject matter itself should not remain permanently exiled as dramatic fare...
...At first, Caponsacchi refuses to interfere...
...The Captive T'HE consensus of opinion among critics would seem to be—so far—that Edouard Bourdet's La Prisonniere, presented in this country in a translation by Arthur Hornblow, Jr., under the name of The Captive, is a dignified and restrained and, theatrically speaking, effective treatment of a type of degeneracy hitherto barred from the stage...
...Murray's work deserves the success it has attained abroad...
...Guido tells his plausible story of an unfaithful wife and murder of the parents in self-defense...
...The play makes that abundantly clear...
...The more skilful the lawyer, the less he tries directly to excuse the crime and the more vigorously he bemoans the misguided youth of the murderer, or, in the case of a woman, her beauty and helplessness in the face of cosmic urges or deep provocations...
...But Guido, who has married her for her money, and without love, is plotting to rid himself of her...
...Like so many treatments of the more normal crimes and sins of the world, The Captive represents the sentimentalized school—a treatment which sheds glamour about the very thing it sets out to condemn, the kind of treatment, for example, that a skilful lawyer would use in behalf of a young and confessed murderer, a plea, in sum, for clemency, for moral November 10, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 17 extenuation...
...Hampden, Caponsacchi makes just those demands for spiritual fervor and romantic courage which, in Cyrano, brought out his finest powers...
...The first is whether the treatment is entirely honest...
...16 THE COMMONWEAL November 10, 1926 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER Caponsacchi WALTER HAMPDEN has given New York audiences in Caponsacchi everything which he failed to provide in The Immortal Thief—the true glamour of the romantic play...
...The second aspect of this play—the subject itself as distinct from its treatment—raises the age-old question: "Is all of life fit material for the stage...
...The court opens its session...
...The audience, like the listening Pope, is in doubt...
...In the first place, he lets his play develop from character rather than plot...
...She resents equally the youthful vitality of the young girl who comes into their lives, even before she suspects her father's infatuation, because she envies in another the things she herself has been denied...
...To give his scheme outward justification, Guido forges a correspondence between Caponsacchi and Pompilia...
...Shine as the would-be youthful father stands out conspicuously...
...The present adapters of the Browning poem have done a worthy and distinguished piece of work which manages somehow to live and to have an amazing sense of present reality...
...Murray's method bears certain interesting resemblances to that of Eugene O'Neill...
...The first act is a little weak in that it does not clearly state the problem which arises later with such tragic consequences...
...He wants to brand them before the world and then take advantage of the unwritten law...
...If given my choice, I would rather see Mr...
...Guido pleads justifiable murder in self-defense...
...It is the Pope, whose prayers have guided him to the truth, who reverses their verdict, orders the execution of Guido and the restoration of Caponsacchi to his place of honor...
...The sympathy of the Roman people is with Count Guido...
...The judges, influenced by public opinion, try to reach a compromise verdict...
...He must hear for himself the story of the two men and pray that his instinct may be guided toward the truth...
...But Pope Innocent XII, who, unknown to all, has listened to the entire story behind a great curtain, renders his verdict in favor of the heroic priest...
Vol. 5 • November 1926 • No. 1
