The Play
Skinner, R. Dana
I88 T H E C O M M O N W E A L December 2~, 1926 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER Mine. Sorel in Camille C ECILE SOREL is one of the institutions of the Paris stage and a particular luminary...
...But unless you are enamored of the Barrymore voice, you cannot but regret the moments when it rises to a chanting key and seems to come anywhere but from the heart...
...In other words, it offers the most trite and threadbare of all answers to the "double standard" problem--which is to abolish all standards whatsoever...
...A clever fellow, this Somerset Maugham...
...I88 T H E C O M M O N W E A L December 2~, 1926 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER Mine...
...The chief merit of the play, up to this point, is its tender delineation of character...
...The Shuberts have brought her to New York with Louis Ravet, also of the Com~die, and an excellent group of French actors for a brief repertory season of notable plays in French...
...Here and now, however, it is time to part company with the critics who find unconscionable delight in the curiously old- fashioned sophistication of the play itself...
...The Constant Wife T HE return of Ethel Barrymore from Shakespeare to a modem drawing-room holds no small intrinsic interest-- above all, when it is a return to comedy...
...There is, however, a sin-cerity in the writing of this tragedy which puts it in a vastly different category from the Maugham play of similar name...
...It is probable that American audiences would find even more to acclaim in the work of another Com~die artist, Mine...
...This is a creditable undertaking, and one which affords New York a unique opportunity to compare the tech- nique of the most traditional of French theatres with our own productions...
...Her present vehicle, a play by Somerset Maugham, gives her many of those oppor- tunities which, by right of early conquest, are properly her own--individual scenes in which she is incomparable, moments in which she can make the raising of an eyebrow tell far more than pages of dialogue, or convey secrets to the audience with all the delicacy of a telepathic message...
...Two dancers in the fourth act were permitted the same liberty with precisely the same result...
...And then, too, Mine...
...Such a breaking of the illusion of the play is inexcusable...
...Of the production as a whole, one felt that it was a curious combination of lavishness in certain details with a shabby second-rateness in others...
...Sorel's own costumes, and many of the draperies and properties were in conspicuous contrast with the shabbiness of the scenery and the conventional lighting arrangements...
...The engaging and ironic title springs from the fact that the wife insists on remaining constantly a wife and on returning to her nonplussed husband at the conclusion of her avowed infidelity...
...Sorel has that chance beloved of all actresses to run the full gamut of emotion, pathos and the thin edge of sentimentality...
...The play itself is by no means a great one...
...Sorel's acting in Camille never touched...
...Sorel loses none of her golden opportunities...
...In La Dame Aux Cam~lias, better known to American audiences as Camille, by Alexandre Dumas the younger, Mine...
...Teresa is a wild and intense bit of...
...Sorel in Camille C ECILE SOREL is one of the institutions of the Paris stage and a particular luminary of the Com~die Fran- qaise...
...The only trouble with the laughter he provokes is that it is freighted with halitosis--itself an-other symptom, perhaps, of the onward march of civilization...
...It is only the rare genius of a generation who can afford the utter luxury of abandon by filling what are otherwise empty gestures with a volcanic force...
...I happened to see the latter last winter in a play of Paul Geraldy's, Robert et Marianne, and there were moments when her smouldering restraint attained a power which Mine...
...In sum, an interesting evening, but not a very exciting one, except for the delight of exquisite diction and the innate beauty of the French lines spoken as only the artists of the Corn&lie can speak them...
...Sorel's best moments are in panto- mime or when she lets loose a tornado of emotion...
...Sorel is not such a genius...
...There was nothing of the least in- terest in the stage setting or lightings...
...The supper party of the first act was an example of the worst possible direction-- particularly when M. Gerval as the sprightly Rieux quite for- got that he was singing a comic song for his fellow guests, turned his back on them, and sang it directly at the audience in the most approved musical comedy style...
...It is, they tell us, a most "civilized" thought...
...But it is undoubt- edly an excellent vehicle for one actress bent on showing the range of her powers, and Mine...
...Pierat...
...It has, as a tragedy, one essential weakness--namely that the death of Teresa Sanger comes from a purely accidental cause, a valvular lesion of the heart, and has no relation whatever to the theme of the play itself...
...Old-fashioned--because there is much talk about the economic independence of women, about the evil of being a "parasite," and other stock material of the early Shaw period or reminiscent of the days when woman suffrage thought it had to find economic justifi- cation...
...Sophistication--because the sympathies of the comedy are led toward a wife who takes her husband's infidelity with such great unconcern that she can find no better answer to it than a corresponding infidelity of her own, once she has estab- lished her "economic independence" by going into business and paying her own board...
...In the first place, her voice has strict limitations...
...It is simply the heavy hand of the author bringing to a convenient if pathetic close a life that was born to frustration and sorrow...
...YetAthe truth must be told that the qualities of exaggera- tion which are part of the accepted convention of the older school of French acting fall a little heavily in a day when the opposite extreme of restraint has become the law on our own stage...
...The Constant Nymph S TILL another "constant" play, based, of course, on the novel of the same name by Margaret Kennedy, and drama- tized by the author and Basil Dean, the present director and co-producer with George Tyler...
...And there are many moments during the play when her personal magnetism establishes a very definite and powerful illusion of reality...
...She is---let it be said in all charity--no longer young, and it is no little tribute to the perfection of her art that after the /irst few minutes one forgets this fact com-pletely...
...It is this quite exact example of "making the punishment fit the crime" which has sent the sophisticates into howls of glee...
...It is often shrill and unpleasant...
...In the death scene of the last act, it became not so much feeble as infantilewalways a voice under perfect control and obedient to her least wish, yet without subtlety of range...
...She conveys the emotions of youth with an art that is impeccable within its own carefully limited intentions...
Vol. 5 • December 1926 • No. 7
