The Play
Skinner, Richard Dana
THE PLAY By RICHARD DANA SKINNER Michael and Mary JUST as the Theatre Guild has become producer extraordinary for Bernard Shaw in this country, it is beginning to appear that Charles Hopkins has...
...The police are trying to piece together his life as part of the evidence...
...In the end he kills her but alleges that she has committed suicide...
...It is important to give this brief outline of plot in order to indicate the double comment which Milne makes...
...The Russia we see through this play is not a land of happiness...
...THE PLAY By RICHARD DANA SKINNER Michael and Mary JUST as the Theatre Guild has become producer extraordinary for Bernard Shaw in this country, it is beginning to appear that Charles Hopkins has acquired a similar commission from A. A. Milne...
...it is Danton and his friends under the sinister shadow of the guillotine...
...Michael and Mary are safe again for the moment...
...The play furnishes two distinct comments upon a serious decision made and acted upon by Michael and Mary...
...They "marry...
...At the Guild Theatre...
...Shall we let this red rust eat into our souls, or shall we strip it off, be patient even in this transition phase, and keep the torch lighted...
...It seems that the soldier imposter found dead in Michael's rooms years before was a notorious criminal yes, connected with an important gang just brought to justice...
...It is a sprawling, vivid tragedy, filled with the coarseness and brutality of speech that inheres in its theme, and shot through with a turgid and acrid atmosphere...
...Both The Ivory Door and The Perfect Alibi were produced at Mr...
...Falsehood means piling one lie on another...
...In the casting of the play, Mr...
...n Beck Theatre...
...It is a picture vastly more terrifying than the flames of revolution...
...Michael in the hands of Henry Hull becomes an intense and vivid part...
...Michael and Mary has some startingly good scenes and many poignant and sensitive moments, interspersed with a good deal that borders on the trite in dramatic situation and a good deal that comes dangerously close to the saccharine philosophy that "love is all that matters" meaning, of course, that the play stirs your sympathies deeply for deeds and decisions which are essentially wrong...
...He shows you the devious processes by which they find a mental justification for what they want to do...
...Hopkins has done an almost perfect job...
...But interwoven with this, we have a dozen cross-glimpses of the mass life of student Russia the disheartened poets, the group trying to sustain their courage in the gymnasium, the sordid parties in the student cells, the conflicts of principles and ideals breaking forth in the trial of Terekhine, the courage and the cowardice, the cringing fears, the desperate recklessness, the individual tortured souls, all the horror and pity of twisted purpose, false hopes and distorted mentalities...
...Herbert Bieberman as Terekhine, Gale Sondergaard as Nina, Luther Adler as Piotr and Franchot Tone as Fedor are among the many who give as honest and as striking performances as you are apt to find anywhere on our stage today...
...He and Michael quarrel...
...The third possible choice they never consider...
...What we see is not so much the trial of fortitude as the active forces of disintegration at work the forces that make a pack of men turn upon each other like beasts...
...Both in staging and scenic effect, the play is an achievement of splendid proportions...
...They are thrown together by chance...
...He is, of course (and this is where the play turns trite for a period) a blackmailer and a crook, also a man with a weak heart...
...The theme is this: what happens to a country when red rust begins to eat into the sharp metal of revolution...
...Red Rust was first produced in 1927 at the Moscow State Proletarian Theatre, and since there is no record of its having been suppressed, we may suppose that, like most important plays, it reflects the feelings of its Russian audiences...
...In a novel and extraordinary scene, Michael, before calling in the police, rehearses every detail of what he will say the story of the pretended ex-soldier who comes to beg money, becomes insolent when refused and falls dead when pushed...
...It is a play which no one seriously interested in modern Russia can well afford to miss though, needless to say, it is not precisely a holiday fable for children...
...But in their apparent safety they find being thoroughly sensitive natures the very reverse of the danger which had once lent an aspect of courage to their great decision...
...There is not an amateurish bit of work in the whole performance...
...In all of this, the Theatre Guild Studio group convey an immense feeling of vitality...
...She cannot (in England) obtain a divorce on grounds of desertion...
...No longer able to bear the hypocrisy of their concealment, they tell the children the truth, only to find sympathy and approval...
...Michael and Mary is essentially a Greek tragedy, ending in that (to the Greeks) insoluble conflict between mistaken deed and its retribution...
...Essentially a bully, Terekhine has taken to live with him the unfortunate Nina, whom he tortures in secret...
...There are many passages which, to a Russian, might say: "Behold these weaklings who are degrading all the fine things for which we fought: behold the type of men who lack the courage to live through the dull days of reaction: behold the men who damage us in the eyes of the rest of the world...
...It is an interpretation by Russians of the present regime V. Kirchon and A. Ouspensky with a stamp of Russian approval upon it...
...The play, as they put it on, is a revelation of dramatic power as applied to the interpretation of the mass mind in death...
...There is indication of an early marriage...
...The Greek influence is, I believe, important in estimating this play that doctrine of retribution upon which Greek tragedy is built, and which was to find its only solution in the deeper understanding of Christianity the possibility of the forgiveness of the guilt of sin without, however, escape from the temporal punishment which might be its due...
...Hopkins's own tiny theatre (and both, be it remarked, with distinct success) and now we have a third Milne play, written this time especially for Mr...
...The retributive power of "deed" is at last apparently dead forever...
...Red Rust AT LAST we have what appears to be and probably is an authentic interpretation of the mind of Russia t)aay...
...In this sense, the play is distinctly propaganda...
...Possibly to Russian ears there are many moments of inspiration in the impassioned declaimings of those few souls who still cling to ideals...
...He has long since deserted his peasant wife, and flaunts before Nina the many other women with whom he has affairs...
...They finally decide, for their son's sake, to string together the chain of lies...
...It tells the story of one Terekhine a soldier who fought well in the early days of the revolution and has been living since on his past glories, a brutal sensualist, tolerated by his comrades of the party simply because he has shown the power to get grain from the peasants...
...And so it comes to pass that a tender and honorable friendship between Michael and Mary grows into a deep love which they can solve (according to their own ideas of courage) only by going through a marriage ceremony in the full knowledge that their act constitutes deliberate bigamy...
...He takes you inside the minds of Michael and Mary...
...But not quite...
...More things than human love must count if life is to reveal its richest mysteries and its magic truth...
...In the ultimate approval of their son and his wife, Milne seems to indicate his own approval...
...But the arguments it presents, both to the emotions and to the intelligence, seem flat and unconvincing...
...The nearly forgotten husband returns...
...Deed" thus still lives on, demanding its inevitable toll of consequences...
...The police come in...
...Thirteen years pass before "deed" as the Hindus would express it begins to show its power of everlasting life, its curious quality of permanence in the affairs of men: the past, in a very direct though complicated sense, always molding and directing the present...
...At every instant it seems as if Michael's story would break down through some neglected detail...
...Michael's story holds water...
...Just as the last chapter seems to close, the police sergeant of an earlier act, who has always kept in close touch with Michael (admiring him as a "fellow-author") drops in to have a nip of whisky and to tell of a strange discovery...
...At the Martin Beck Theatre...
...It is Russia at the nadir...
...Then what to do...
...He shows you all the sensitive fineness of their affection, and why they choose the way they do out of their supposed impasse...
...This red rust we are shown with such merciless candor is a far different thing from the dark night of the soul experienced by individual mystics...
...The living lie will out no matter how great the first provocation, nor how pitiful the extenuating circumstances...
...They have a son...
...Mary has been deserted by her husband, and has no idea where he has gone...
...How his treachery is unearthed, how he tries to defend himself against the mob, and how he himself is at last brought to crude justice this is the plot substance of the play...
...Michael pushes him violently and suddenly finds him dead...
...And yet, with a touch that is almost Greek, he shows the nemesis...
...It eats into their souls until that day, another decade later, when their son announces his secret marriage to a very lovable girl...
...The method of the play is simple...
...It is a place of drab and utter disillusionment, where the flames of enthusiasm have become mere embers, and where everyone is asking himself "what next ?" Its most curious quality is its lack of the kind of propaganda we might expect in a play produced in and for Russia...
...As the play ends, Michael and Mary are once more faced with danger with a public disclosure of all that seemed buried in their lives, with danger, too, for their son and his new wife...
...The truth means a scandals unhappiness for their son, David...
...They feel that, because it involves danger and risk, it is a far more courageous thing to do than to enjoy illicit companionship...
...It is not the continental army at Valley Forge...
...One of the police sergeants with a turn for writing romantic fiction is certain that the dead man is Mary's former husband but adds such fantastic embroidery to his theory that the whole suggestion is laughed at...
...The minor parts are taken with a rare perfection of ensemble well worthy of the delicate shadings which only Milne and Barrie can give to characters...
...Michael makes notable progress as a writer...
...Because of the very tenderness and humanity with which it is written, it is a play of misleading values exaggerated in its premises and never more than half true in its conclusions...
...Soon they will know to whom...
...Edith Barrett as Mary gives an amazing portrait of a woman to whom all lengths of devotion even mistaken devotion are possible...
Vol. 11 • January 1930 • No. 9
