The Play
Skinner, R. Dana
608 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER Her Cardboard Lover JEANNE EAGELS is, of course, the chief interest in Her Cardboard Lover, not because she does the best acting in the play, but because she...
...He has a certain intense quality, but more of the kind one associates with a political zealot...
...But even this specious device fails to bring the right pitch of emotional intensity...
...And their cautiously worded endorsements undoubtedly would have throbbed with just about as much life as does most of Vajda's dialogue...
...Came the day when Rain stopped...
...But Basil Sidney is quite unequal to the task of making the Crown Prince seem real...
...I readily admit never having been present at a scene between an emperor and his erring son...
...Witnesses so seldom agree on such points...
...It has plenty of comedy artifice, but none of the art of comedy...
...You might as well know this much about The Spider in advance...
...Vajda and Miss Akins between them have only given us gaudy puppets...
...It is too bad that he was not advertising his cigarettes in the days of the "Royal Romance in Three Acts," by Ernest Vajda, now exhibited as The Crown Prince after being put into English by Miss Zoe Akins...
...In the end, he not only prevents a reconciliation between the divorced pair, but succeeds in substituting himself as the second husband of the fickle lady...
...For the international personages of imperial and royal blood crowding the pages of this romance could have furnished an imposing array of testimonials...
...He is right down in the audience, too, just taking a gold locket, with a spider ornamentation on it, from a young girl...
...A little tailoring of speech casts about it the cloak of pseudosmartness, and promptly the critics proclaim it a swift, deft comedy...
...And now she's here, and the play, they say, is a success, and the best actor in it, by far, is Leslie Howard...
...The Spider ' IAHERE is no use getting unduly alarmed about The A Spider...
...They seem to lose sight completely of the difference between vulgarity and coarseness...
...All of this to the accompaniment of scenes and situations quite obviously suggested by the premises...
...It is not a savory story at best, although the idea of the loveless marriages of royalty is supposed to furnish the romantic justification for the Crown Prince's secret love, and to create the glamour of sympathy which would be absent in the case of ordinary mortals...
...In spite of all the praise that has been lavished on this play, its wit is vulgar wit, however carefully disguised, and its comedy situations are vulgar situations...
...That clever guess proved correct...
...When the Crown Prince abdicates his right of succession, the Emperor persuades Anna to put poison into his wine, on the promise of high favors to come...
...It is, after all, just a trick, and clever tricks are apt to degenerate in the course of two hours into mere stunts...
...Behind the history of the Hapsburgs lies a wealth of material for high tragedy, and not the least of these treasures is the mysterious death of the son of Franz Joseph at his hunting lodge nearly fifty years ago...
...Sidney most distinctly lacks...
...It is not as bad as all that...
...For some four years she has uttered no lines but those of Sadie Thompson in Rain...
...But I do know that the job of a playwright is to make his characters seem real, and that Mr...
...Only the glamour of headstrong romanticism could raise this royal and imperial tragedy to effective heights...
...There are moments when Mary Ellis, as Anna, triumphs over the creaking plot by making certain scenes poignant...
...To satisfy the sophisticates, you only have to be vulgar in what they consider a smart way...
...You will never know from this page which one of your neighbors in the audience fired the shot, or if it was one of your neighbors at all, and not one of those curious characters on the stage...
...608 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER Her Cardboard Lover JEANNE EAGELS is, of course, the chief interest in Her Cardboard Lover, not because she does the best acting in the play, but because she is acting in the play at all...
...One resents far more than the vacuities of the play itself the hypocrisy (or it is self-deception...
...Therefore, with so much happiness lying around and to spare, a word of sadness and disappointment is not amiss...
...Alexander starts to answer...
...Rumor, floating outward from Chanin's Fortysixth Street Theatre, may have convinced you that unless your nerves are of iron and your heart of steel, and its valves are well ground and working properly, the mere ordeal of sitting through this mystery play might end your evening at the undertaker's nearest workshop...
...To protect herself from her own weakness, she hires Andre Sallicel to pose as her latest romantic attachment...
...Vulgarity is something of the mind, coarseness is of the body or speech...
...The Crown Prince A CIGARETTE advertiser in the theatre programs is listing, week by week, "the many international personages of royal and noble blood who have signified their approval" of his cigarettes...
...Plays of this sort start with nothing and leave you with less...
...You never can tell when suspicion might land on the wrong person, and alibis are getting increasingly hard to prove...
...Henry Stephenson as the Emperor achieves a striking likeness of Franz Joseph and almost makes one forget the deeply artificial villainy of his lines...
...Only they use the word vulgar to denote coarseness, and call "smart" vulgarity deft comedy...
...Then the query, "What will become of Jeanne Eagels...
...At this, the Emperor determined to disillusionize his son by proving that the Baroness, Anna, cared only for the crown...
...He has done everything in the way of plot to supply the basis of absorbing drama...
...This suggestion is not made in any spirit of ridicule of the basic idea of the play...
...But just then the nervous lady behind me said to her companion, "Perhaps it's real," and of course that broke the spell...
...And that Mr...
...He is the magician and mind-reader of the Tivoli vaudeville who is performing at the moment the shooting takes place...
...And who shall disagree with them...
...Then the Emperor turns about and warns his son of what is to happen...
...No one even fainted on the day I risked my life...
...When the house manager came running to the scene of action, and summoned one of my neighbors (who said he was a doctor) and the whole show was stopped while an inquisitive police inspector insisted on finding out who fired the shot, it began to look as if the best thing I could do was to pick up my hat and coat, and depart...
...But the Crown Prince, instead of avoiding the poison, drinks it, preferring to die rather than live without Anna's love...
...Then the shot is fired...
...Someone might have thrown a gun under my seat...
...Vajda has woven a romance about this incident, using fact, fiction, and gossip to fill out the details of a story whose real inwardness will probably never be known...
...Coarseness is the only dramatic sin they recognize...
...But Chatrand the Great will have to unravel the full mystery for you...
...It will save you needless shock, and will still leave you with the mystery unsolved...
...The play itself is just another one from the overworked mill of sophistication, with the eternal French triangle, the everlasting bed and such minor trappings of wit as a carefully doctored situation brings forth...
...But the audiences at The Spider seem to have a fine time...
...There is nothing of the ardent or romantic lover in his manner and less in his speech...
...Her companion protests, but Chatrand insists on asking his medium, Alexander "with the radio eyes" to explain the locket's mystery...
...This novelty in the handling of a mystery play may prove a little too novel...
...The lights suddenly go out...
...of those to whom the manner of doing and saying something vulgar is everything and the vulgarity itself nothing...
...He shifts the entire burden to the very competent shoulders of Miss Ellis, which is asking entirely too much and contributing nothing...
...The story of this play has it that the Crown Prince, being forced into a loveless marriage, according to family tradition, discovered a real attachment for a certain baroness, defied court opinion by taking her to his hunting lodge, and demanded the right to set aside his wife and make the Baroness the future Empress...
...And the author, Jacques Deval, presumably is happy and so are the adapters, Valerie Wyngate and P. G. Wodehouse...
...A dramatic critic, according to tradition, must always disagree with the audience, so I had to make up my mind that it wasn't real, and that perhaps the stage had just spilled over into the audience by way of novelty...
...But then, what is the use of living in New York if you cannot become accustomed to casual murders and the like...
...He proves excessively if very properly faithful in his cardboard task, for the simple reason that he is really in love with Simone...
...To be sure, someone fired a revolver quite near me (in a relative way of speaking) and policemen stormed up and down the aisles, and the serious-looking man on the end seat of the row in front was shot to death, and the girl with him seemed most distressed and tearful about it...
...All he has failed to do (and this may be partly the fault of Miss Akins) is to give his characters the breath of reality...
...Anna, discovering too late how great was the love of the Crown Prince for her, repents, and then drinks the rest of the poison herself...
...and latterly the answer that she would play a tinseled divorcee of Paris and the Riviera...
...Which reminds me that Chatrand must be introduced...
...Real comedy of character or of keen observation is thrown overboard for the trite stuff of the smoking-car or the club-bar...
...Simone Lagorce has divorced her husband for quite sufficient legal grounds, but still loves him...
...You might try your skill as a reporter by trying to tell in the darkness which direction the shot came from...
...I can only guess at the humanity which might emerge from dress-parade uniforms, at the universal note of anguish and conflict which might jump from imperial and royal breasts as swiftly as from humbler hearts...
...Too often, instead of addressing his tender lines to Anna, he is searching for a vision in the cloud-lands of the gallery...
...The very mannerisms which made him so excellent as 609 Raskolnikoff in the dramatic version of Dostoievsky's Crime and Punishment prove fatal in the present role...
...Hence the disappointment that so much that is good (in acting) should be wasted on so little that is worth while...
...She consents...
...And you know the rest—or as much of it as can decently be told...
...A few optimists thought they might see her again in New York before she had passed her two score and ten mark, but most of the theatre world had settled down to the belief that Rain would go on forever...
Vol. 5 • April 1927 • No. 22
