Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/124



ERNARD SHAW'S has been not very interestingly done by the Theatre Guild. But then the play itself is not very interesting—as Shaw goes. I always feel about Mr Basil Sidney—the Dick Dudgeon of the production—that he might conceivably be good in some other rôle than the one I am seeing him in—in this case, perhaps, that of the Minister. It seems to me a great mistake to cast him for these sprightly and dashing parts. For one thing, his delivery is too slow. Earlier in the season, in the Hopkins', he was the least mercurial Mercutio I have ever seen. He delivered Mercutio's witty jibes in a drawl suggestive of Josh Billings and unloaded the Queen Mab speech painfully like a wagonful of bricks, staggering with one phrase at a time and then heaving up his back for another. And to he brings neither the fire nor the nimble wits of the part. His mind seems actually to move more slowly than that of the stupid people he is supposed to confound.

For the rest, the rôle of the younger brother, whom the text makes nothing worse than thick-witted, is not only perverted into a village idiot part, but is doubly ruined by an actor who has obviously no gift for idiocy, but looks as if he would be far more at home as a brilliant young Member of Parliament in an English drawing-room drama. Mr Roland Young, as General Burgoyne, is intelligent, as always, but seemed to me to be hampered a little by the habitual constraint of his stage presence from representing a character whose easy manners are supposed to contrast with the stiff ones of the army.

by Philip Barry is a partially interesting attempt to deal with an authentic theme and to study an authentic milieu. But it is badly spoiled before the end and I believe for the following reasons. In the first place, Mr Barry takes the inhabitants of his country house for very smart and cultivated people when they are actually half-baked in the extreme. You think he is going to study them seriously, then you discover that he shares their view of