The Play
Skinner, Richard Dana
THE PLAY By RICHARD DANA SKINNER Death Takes a Holiday THIS play, from the original Italian by Alberto Casella, has been a long time in reaching the New York stage. For some years Norman Geddes...
...In this case, it is a young American, on sick leave from the Canadian army during the war, who meets an ex-chorus girl, also American plying her trade on Waterloo Bridge, proceeds to fall in love with her without understanding what she is (the device of an air raid gives plausibility to their meeting) and then wants to marry her...
...Whether or not you regard this as a morbid tale depends on how far you accept the author's premise that life at best is but a transient and painful existence, compared to which eternal life should be the mystic goal of all...
...Cole Porter's music is delightful and refreshing, and the dances of Tilly Losch-who was first seen here with Reinhardt-are worth an admission in themselves...
...Her hands alone have the eloquence of genius...
...The present adaptation is by Walter Ferris, the production by Lee Shubert, with Lawrence Marston directing and Rollo Wayne designing the setting...
...To add another to the list, even when it is endowed with much sensitive writing and acted with rare discretion by a capable cast, is merely to try one's patience needlessly...
...Marston's direction is also smooth and persuasive...
...For some years Norman Geddes dreamed of producing it in truly imaginative style, but was unable to get the necessary backing...
...At the Ethel Barrymore Theatre...
...Children of Darkness TWO married couples now effectually dominate the New York stage...
...Certainly in the detail of the plot and action, much of the morbid sting is removed by many passages of delicious comedy-Death's embarrassments in his first human contacts, the sly double significance of everything he says, the contrasting attitudes of the various characters as, all unsuspecting, they discuss life, love and eternity in Death's presence...
...She says she has known him from the first in his true form-and departs with him...
...It is only in the closing moments of the last act that its fabric of invention grows thin and its central idea fails to mature completely...
...Among the many guests is Grazia, daughter of the Princess of San Luca-a fragile and lovely child...
...Either the author or the adapter (it is quite impossible to tell which) has preferred to beg the question by a sort of vague doctrine of wish fulfilment...
...Death reveals his plans to the petrified Duke, promising him that no harm will come to any of his guests, unless the Duke reveals the identity of his strange visitor...
...And during this springtime, Death learns the meaning of human love...
...Basil Sydney and Mary Ellis have a similar niche wherever they happen to be playing...
...Frank Greene, in particular, as a major in the Foreign Legion who has often caught glimpses of Death, gives us a few moments of inspired simplicity...
...In spite of this, Death remains puzzled to the end, for he knows eternal is so much simpler than temporal life...
...The good-hearted girl of the underworld has been the subject of thousands of published and unpublished stories...
...But inevitably it is filled with a lot of talk of "the trade," and I cannot see the slightest new light which it sheds on the ancient profession...
...But this is in the positive terms of seeking the vision and the love of God...
...Yet . . . The conspicuous missing link in this chain of fantasy is, of course, the absence of all concept of God in reference to eternal life...
...In fact, the whole play is quite frankly keyed to lechery, raucous, outspoken and robust after its fashion...
...Death explains that he has recently "visited" Prince Sirki (one of the guests expected that evening) and that the Duke can let him masquerade as the missing Prince...
...The particular plot selected to illustrate the idea is simple...
...It concerns the outrageous doings of a group of upper class criminals in Newgate Prison, London, in the year 1725...
...They are both excellent teams and in different ways...
...Nor has he even partly compensated for this, as he might easily have done, by making Death, in the last few moments of revelation, a brilliant figure of deliverance, in contrast to man's everyday sinister illusion...
...The processes of decay are halted...
...Merrivale's supporting cast is excellent...
...By bringing the lamp of illusion with him, Death can completely disguise his real aspect and be free to move among unsuspecting humans...
...There have been saints aplenty who have prayed for death as the moment when the only true life would begin...
...Waterloo Bridffe THE erstwhile author of The Road to Rome, Robert Em-mett Sherwood, has gone back over the years to write that sentimental play about the street-walker which emerges from four out of five incipient writers...
...In idea and in execution, it is an engaging fantasy, which manages to present a novel thought with an unexpected sense of reality...
...Death appears in semihuman but still forbidding form to Duke Lambert just as he is arranging a house-party at his castle...
...Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne have a niche of their own at the Theatre Guild...
...In that respect it is as quiet as a village tea-party...
...The girl is self-sacrificing-but no one has ever suspected that even the lowest types may lack certain genuine impulses...
...But much of the play is merely broad and bawdy farce, accented here and there with downright melodrama...
...The one thought he cannot bear is to have them shrink from him as they have done through countless centuries...
...At the Selwyn Theatre...
...From the jailer himself, up and down, they are the worst group of grafters, murderers, highwaymen, pickpockets, poets-in-debt and aristocratic degenerates one could imagine crowded onto one small stage...
...Unlike Ladies of the Evening, and many other plays similar in theme, Waterloo Bridge offers no sensational scenes...
...At the Biltmore Theatre...
...The girl (June Walker) falls equally in love, but abandons the boy (Glenn Hunter) rather than disillusion him by telling the truth...
...Obviously this idea offers endless possibilities in specific treatment...
...It has at least the good grace to seek no concealment under hypocrisy and sentimentality or the infantile smirks called sophistication...
...A garrulous landlady does tell him the truth, however, which does not alter his determination...
...Both La Ruse and Laetitia are "fat" acting parts, but the play itself, mentioned on the program as being "in the picaresque manner" is so obviously a mannered imitation that its bawdiness must be considered deliberate rather than spontaneous...
...If the audience could be, so to speak, let in on the secret, and permitted to see Death at the last as Grazia herself must have seen him, then the author's idea would have reached full maturity, and one would have felt almost ready to pity the other characters on the stage, to whom Death still remained a symbol of horror...
...Death (alias Prince Sirki) falls deeply in love with her...
...That is where invention fails in the last act...
...It just adds one more to the long list of plays which rob the stage of the beauty, sensitive intelligence and illumination which should be its inheritance-particularly when serving as the vehicle for such artists...
...Sydney and Miss Ellis could find more useful employment...
...A tragic note precedes the final curtain, only to be swept aside by a lecherous remark of that old reprobate, Lord Wainwright...
...It is a sort of concentrated springtime...
...She is the only one who does not instinctively fear him...
...Thanks to a beautiful performance by Philip Merrivale, Death becomes, as the author intended, quite an engaging and romantic figure, and not a little pathetic withal...
...It is a serious reflection on American audiences that the British, when they prepare a show for us, believe they must resort to this kindergarten sex sophistication...
...The latest Sydney-Ellis play is by Edwin Justus Mayer, with settings and costumes by Robert Edmond Jones...
...Imagine, if you can, a moment in time when Death, belonging to the world of eternity, becomes curious to know why mortals fear him and cling to life...
...At the Fulton Theatre...
...It does seem as if the singular talents of Mr...
...A little more courage and it might have assumed genuine proportions as a modern successor to the older morality plays...
...Essentially, then, the idea of the play is at one with belief in life as a brief pilgrimage, and Death as a revelation of higher life...
...Imagine, further, that to satisfy his curiosity he decides to take a holiday and to assume for three days human form and to subject himself to human appetites and emotions...
...Wake Up and Dream CHARLES B. COCHRANE'S imported review, featuring Jack Buchanan, Jessie Matthews and that superlative dancer, Tilly Losch, is a strange compound of unusual beauty and wit with much that is wearisomely trite...
...As to the jailer's daughter, Laetitia, her indiscriminate favors give the key to most of the graft her father is able to extract from his unwilling lodgers...
...During the period of this holiday, nothing dies...
...Rose Hobart as Grazia is utterly believable in her fragile directness...
...In the end, when it is time for Death to end his holiday, he once more strips himself of all illusion and asks Grazia if she will go with him...
...But the long series of jokes and sketches on marital infidelities are stale and obvious beyond belief...
...He begins to understand at last why humans fear him, why they grow attached to familiar objects, and why the parting with loved ones seems unendurable...
...Among all the recent plays which attempt to toy with the supernatural, this one approaches nearest to successful illusion, both in the possibilities of the script and in their realization...
...Rollo Wayne's setting of the great hall, with a vision of the moon-drenched garden beyond, does much to create a believable mood for this novel fantasy...
...There is, of course, a redeeming touch of vagabond heroism in the person of Count La Ruse (Basil Sydney...
...He is recalled suddenly to the front, and finds the girl once more, just before his train leaves, back on Waterloo Bridge...
...No accidents happen...
...Comedy and irony succeed in making it reasonably palatable, but not in giving it the supreme note which it might have struck in the hands of a poet with Dantesque vision and faith...
...No leaves wither and fall...
...It simply does not go far enough-as if the author (or adapter) felt a curious timidity in driving his thoughts to a triumphant conclusion...
...Waterloo Bridge merely skims the surface of sentimental half-truths...
Vol. 11 • January 1930 • No. 13
