The Play

...A great producer, he will have nothing to do with banking, with that financial system which we have been led to believe is the dominant factor in the world's affairs...

...There is a violent conflict between the mother and the foster- mother, one of those quarrels of sisters which seem to unleash the furies of jealousy and madness...

...She has here a part of infinite variety and quite properly glories in her opportunities...

...Shaw insists so fre-quently on stopping the play to step before the actors and give his own views---provocative views in an essay, but thor- oughly annoying in the theatre...

...They are more important to business than they are to labor...

...But Erhardt goes his own way--a youth who has already escaped the physical bondage of a home, but without escaping the neurotic tie of the Borkman house, since he runs away with a woman much older than himself...

...The right price is the lowest price an article can steadily be sold for...

...No political leader has made such a change in people's lives or has created such a world of new interests...

...The Witch T HE WITCH, a tragedy by the Norwegian dramatist and director, Wiers-Jensen, has been familiar to students of the drama in text for some seven or eight years, and is now, at the Greenwich Village Theatre, given its first per- formance in America...

...It has about it the solemn wink of farce, yet it is more than farce...

...It: is an interesting experiment and one which, coupled to extremely low prices, seems to be achieving early success...

...Dudley Digges directs, this revival has the charm of well-knit movement...

...Certainly Eliza is delicate meat to a good actress, and there are few better than Miss Lynn Fontanne...

...Into this tense atmosphere, Ella returns after eight years, to try to win back the love of Erhardt Borkman, Gabriel's son, whom she had brought up in his early youth...

...Ne~ York: Doubleday, Page and Com- pany...

...What, as a producer, is Henry Ford's philosophy...

...Low wages will break business far more quickly than they will labor...

...Shaw in, tended you should do...

...Its discovery, following a night of pas- toral stress, the reproaches of the wife, maddened by what she now deems was the theft of her youth, together proves too much for Absolon's overtried heart...

...Back of his marriage to the wrong sister lies a whole story of twisted mentalities of the kind that Ibsen loves to deal with...

...The immediate consequence of the confession is to provoke the sullen and repressed young woman to an exercise of the power she feels she has inherited, and the age-old tragedy of Paolo and Francesca is reenacted under northern skies...

...The right wage is the highest wage the employer can steadily pay...

...and Sat...

...The whole pro- duction, and Miss Le Gallienne's acting in particular, would be greatly improved by the discipline of an outside director...

...As the doomed Anne, Miss Alice Brady is at all times a tragic and haunting figure...

...And his departures have been signalized by the greatest volume of production in the world's history...

...Here are extracts from his book which indicate it: "Wages are more of a question for business than they are for labor...

...In spite of the importance attached by its producers to the name of Mr...

...Beryl Mercer does a notable bit of work as Mrs...

...Pearce, the housekeeper of the phonetic professor, sympathetic, humorous, and pointed...

...Some of them are boring in their special pleading...

...One is left to speculate on just what such a man, whose interest has been purely scien- tific, would do if faced with the need of summoning a totally different quality of devotion...

...In one of those accesses of remorse which precipitate doom, the unhappy clergyman reveals his sin of silence to son and wife...

...But the play can depend for its appeal on a very tragic and poignant plot, re-inforced by some worthy acting...

...Shaw has somewhat abandoned himself to having a good time...

...Throughout the Le Gallienne production, Beatrice December I, I926 THE COMMONWEAL Io7 Terry manages to be the dominant figure as the acid, proud and possessive Mrs...

...And that is just what Mr...

...2.30 Chickering $258 BOOKS Today and Tomorrow, by Henry Ford in collaboration with Samuel Crov:ther...

...Its power lies chiefly in certain fine theatrical moments, the quarrel of the sisters, the almost sadistic gloom of the first scene, the rebellious boastings of Borkman when Ella returns to him, and the last symbolic scene, almost as remote from reality as some of the scenes in Peer Gynt...

...The minor parts are never slurred for the benefit of the major ones, and although the acting of many of the cast lacks that smoothness which Guthrie McClintick always manages to bring out, the performance as a whole is far above the average...

...Life has a new value to her...

...It lacks the integration and singleness of purpose of the finer Ibsen plays...

...Her own part is that of Ella, the elderly sister-in-law of Borkman--an ex-convict, whose lust for power led him to misuse trust funds, and who has never since given up the hope of returning to power...

...It is, above all, interesting as a representative study of Ibsen's own mind and its problems-- something which one should not feel at the time of witnessing a play, but only in retrospect...

...But no one can rob them of the strength of their dramatic construction nor of the ironic sweep of their catas-trophe...

...Miss Le Gallienne confirms the impression that she is a good, but far from a great, actress...

...They are often deliberately unpleasant...

...They have all the blasting neuroticism of the north countries from which they came...

...John Masefield as adapter, no particular literary quality is discoverable in his translation, which is pedestrian over long stretches...

...As palace chaplain, it was the duty of Absolon, a middle-aged Lutheran pastor, to denounce her to the civil arm...

...This is an annual, and sometimes more frequent, ailment which gives everyone a good time, both in front of and behind the curtain --the degree of the good time depending on the particular Shaw play selected...

...The production of cars and of tractors for agricultural work is only one side of the revolution which Henry Ford is bring- ing about...

...no writer, thinker, or philosophical scientist has affected the habit of thinking of millions of people as this man has...

...There is a robust workmanship and an authentic power to the worst Ibsen plays which set them far above their many and clumsy imitators...

...Five years of tempered happiness are brought to an end by the return of Martin, his son by a former marriage, from the seminary of Wittenberg...

...He is meeting, it would seem, not only a world's want, but a world's longing: it is as though men and women were finding some hope of theirs realized in the machinery he is giving them--the machinery that can be handled by the least expert amongst them...

...They have a strong taint of that kind of moral weakness which is unable to face crises with courage and heroism...

...But higher wages and lower prices mean greater buying power~more customers...

...Maybe this popular actress has taken too literally~ certain charges of lack of restraint made against her when she was the Bride of the Lamb, and replaced it by a repression carried at times over the verge of monotony...

...others are boring because Mr...

...He also intended that you should discover a genuine interest in Eliza Dootittle--that girt of inconceivable vulgarity who becomes, under your eyes, a model of refined dignity...

...She also glorifies them...

...His sudden death gives his mother, who has been an unsleeping and malevolent spy upon the sinful idyll, a chance to overwhelm her daughter-in- law by an accusation of witchcraft and murder, and the curtain falls upon the certainty that the frail young widow will be the victim of just such another spasm of popular cruelty as has already wrung our withers in a former act...

...Money is not the source of any of these qualities, though these qualities are the most frequent sources of money...

...Pygmalion, it will be recalled, is the story of a professor of phonetics who conceives the idea of converting a cockney flower-girl into the outer semblance of a duchess in the space of six months...

...Anne Pedersdotter is the beautiful daughter of a poor widow who has eked out a living by "witchcraft," in other words, by selling simples and specifics to the credulous townsfolk of Bergen...

...It makes you ponder quite seriously on whether--to borrow from and distort advertising rhetoric--you can change the sur- face and change all...

...3.50...

...That is nothing new in the Shavian technique...

...Many of the scenes recall Miss "Ferry's equally fine work in a well-remembered play of two seasons ago, Children of the Moon...

...She never quite extracts the full emotional power from a scene and is afflicted with a large number of manner-isms...

...It is apparent that this play suffers from a conflict of themes for first place...

...But it has its fine moments, and in presenting it, Miss Le Gallienne has shown both courage and ability...

...At the opening of the play, Borkman has con-cealed himself for eight years in the long upstairs gallery of his own house--from where the sounds of his feet can be heard forever pacing up and down, down and up, the maddening rhythm being broken only by occasional bursts of music from his piano...

...The right wage is not the lowest sum a man will work for...

...Henry Ford's system is bound to become a model for other producers, great and little, and this will make a revolution in the business of production...

...Cutting wages is no cure for low consumption--it only makes the consumption still lower by reducing the number of possible customers...

...The most recent addition to the list of plays is Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman--a marked improvement in the sum total of production over Benavente's unhappy Saturday Night reviewed last week...

...The other side is in his conception of business and in the application of his distinctive ideas to his own great factory system...

...Egon Brecher is a theatrical Borkman, earnest enough, but with only rare moments of effectiveness...

...8.30 47th St., West of Broadway Matinees, Wed...

...The way to check a threatened depression is to cut the price and increase the wage...

...But, smitten with an afterglow of physical passion for the girl's beauty, he consents to hold his tongue, and, after her mother's death, carries her to his parsonage as a bride...

...He has turned away from the traditional way of carrying on a great business...

...H. L. S. I I OpenlngDTuesd~ty' Nov...

...The simple fact remains that he has made this problem highly entertaining and given it, for the moment, theatrical plausibility...

...I F ONE were asked to name the most significant figure in the world of today, one would have to point, I think, to Henry Ford...

...Like nearly everything which Mr...

...John Gabriel Borkman is by no means one of the best of Ibsen's works, either in universality of theme or in convinc- ing delineation of character...

...Io6 THE COMMONWEAL December I, 1926 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER Pygmalion ND so, the season being well advanced, the Theatre Guild again bursts forth with an attack of Shaw...

...A fine, flowing, and aggressive performance...

...Borkman's own wifd is Ella's twin sister...

...Industry is not money--it is made up of ideas, labor, and management, and the natural expression of these is not dividends, but utility, quality, and availability...

...The right price is not what the traffic will bear...

...Argue if you will, that the whole situation is highly im-probable, or even utterly preposterous, that Shaw has simply created a straw problem which can only have a straw solution...

...And it is significant that a demand for that machinery and a real interest in the use of it should exist in the least developed countries and amongst hardly cultivated peoples...

...She has no intention of being dropped as abruptly as she was taken up, and at the last curtain the professor is somewhat non-plussed at the possibility that he might have to marry her or otherwise provide for her future...

...In business...

...Borkman...

...In Arms and the Man, how- ever, which opened last year's Guild season, and in Pygmalion, Mr...

...What vitality and humor she puts into the inarticulate wails and yowls of Eliza in the first act--and what awkward meticulousness into the forced niceties of the second--and what stormy emotion into the new creature of the third...

...that is in the enterprise which most closely affects the people of Europe and America, he is a thorough revolutionary...

...In the end, Borkman, his pride crushed, dies in Ella's arms on a lonely mountaln-top, and the two sisters are united for the first time in understanding over his dead body...

...His opinions jump out chiefly in satirical shafts, and his characters achieve a semblance of life...

...When his Galatea comes to llfe ir~ the re-quired time, he finds, to his annoyance, that more than the surface has changed...

...Limited Engagement Actors Theatre Production EUGENE O'NEILL'S BEYOND THE HORIZON Mansfield Theatre---Eves...

...An employer of hundreds of thousands of workers, he gets away from trade-unions, and every kind of labor organization...

...John Gabriel Borkman T THE Eva Le Gallienne Civic Repertory Theatre, they are really playing repertory--that is, playing three differ- ent plays each week, and adding new plays from time to time, very much as they do at the Com6die Fran~aise in Paris...

...In this passage we have his general idea: "It matters not what books may be written, what buildings...

...What sort of a world does Henry Ford look forward to...

...High wages with high prices do not help anyone---it just means that everything has been marked up...