New Plays

The Critic. If you con your memory of school days you will recall that Richard Brinsley Sheridan wrote this play very long ago. Today it is fresh, modern. Whether the urge to satire and to burleque has penetrated the farmhouses and the uplands is difficult to say. Certainly our cities and our comic literature are crammed with it. They are crammed, furthermore, with exactly the type of satire and burlesque which Sheridan devised for The Critic.

A terrific melodrama of history called The Spanish Armada is a play within the play. Captured by the English defenders is a Spanish nobleman. In love with him is the lovely English heroine. The whole thing ends up with a lot of deaths, a fearful sea fight and a pageant for British victory. Through it all, the Critic sits by and thinks everything wonderful.

Where the Neighborhood Playhouse finds its actors is difficult to say. Certainly it finds good ones. The company has an evenness and a flair for the ridiculous unequaled since Beatrice Lillie (Lady Peel) and Gertrude Lawrence entertained with Chariot's extraordinary revue.

Flesh, by Arthur J. Lamb, is another of those things that go down in one's recollection as a great experience. Veteran scribes of the theatre, comparing notes, decided that, on the whole, it was the worst thing they had ever seen in a first-line Broadway playhouse. The plot dealt with a girl who substituted herself for a harlot when her lover tried to take an evening off. So thoroughly ludicrous was the enterprise that the audience hooted with amusement. This has happened, in moderation, before. Never before has one of the actors in a piece actually broken down and laughed at the fatuity of his own lines.

Rosmersholm. Since Ibsen is generally considered the progenitor of the Renaissance in modern drama, no play of his can be passed lightly by. Rosmersholm has sometimes been thought his greatest. Almost everyone had given it attention on the printed page, but very few had ever seen it acted. Mrs. Fiske, John Mason and George Arliss did it once long ago.

Yet the revived Rosmersholm was dull. This dullness was possibly due to the insufficiency of Margaret Wycherly in the part of Rebecca West, and to the propaganda which was Ibsen's material. He had seen in his native land political dissension which was ripping the fabric of its history. He protested against this in a play.

His characters seem the metaphorical figures of the essay rather than the working, laughing children of life. His hero is an indecisive creature who turns radical in politics, finds that radicalism has caused his wife to commit suicide, finally follows suit. Rebecca West is the woman he loves, the woman who has sowed in his wife's mind the seeds of her decision to die. Rebecca jumps into the mill-race with the hero.

The Stagers, a new group of workers for the "Better Things," gave the play an acceptable production. Warren William, a discovery of theirs, looks like John Barrymore, and brought to the central part a personality that whispers of a sound future. For students and for sincere followers of the stage, the production is almost a necessity. The general public will probably regard it as an unnecessary bore.