PARTISAN REV, IEW
Gallienne, playing Katharine of Aragon, suggested a tragedy queen whom
the public as well as her husband had long misunderstood.
John Gabriel Borkman,
revived by the same group, had the advantage
of fresher costumes and the weariness of the acting did not so sharply
distinguish itself from the matter of the play. The play is a debilitated
Peer Gynt,
another study of the self-isolated superior man who loses
his humanity in an abstract passion for excellence. Borkman embezzles
money, confusing this crime with his destiny; he returns from prison
to his bourgeois home a pariah and a god. The action of the play is
over before the curtain rises, yet it thrashes about the stage, questioning,
demanding, recalling, as impotently as old Borkman in his chamber,
and finally, in a last spurt of the will, it moves from realism into sym–
bolism and drags itself with its hero out onto a crag to die. This work
might have seemed a little more substantial had Miss Webster and Miss
Le Gallienne, respectively playing Borkman's wife and his sister-in-law,
dropped the airs of Cassandra, the antiphonal responses, the glare of
prophecy, and asked themselves, for a single instant, what a Norwegian
housewife was like.
Lady Windermere's Fan,
in contrast, is as pretty and professional
as a box of French chocolates. The Cecil Beaton sets have the succulent
vulgarity of a Wilde epigram; the ladies' costumes. seem to have been
dipped in those vegetable dyes used for frostings and are as dainty and
miraculous as
if
they were squeezed out of a pastry-tube. The play, too,
is like some expensive confection, hard and shiny on the outside and soft
and runny at the center. Wilde, as an author, did not have the courage
of his convictions. The cruelty and cynicism of the dialogue is quickly
atoned for by the virtuous sentimentalism of the plot, and what begins
as a monstrous study of the initiation of a strictly brought-up young wife
into the profligate realities of London society becomes not a comedy but
a rather shoddy melodrama in which there is no vice but only scandal,
and the mysterious bad woman turns out to be the heroine's unfortunate
mother. Before the plot, however, has been rectified to suit the conven–
tional morality that the dialogue affects to disdain, there is one truthful
and shocking scene, played by Penelope Ward and Henry Daniell, in
which the young wife, learning of her husband's infidelity, hardens her
own heart. And though it later appears that the husband was not
really
unfaithful, the memory of Miss Ward's acting leaves the audience uncon–
vinced: the transition between innocence and knowledge she has made
as terrible as death.
The Duchess of Malfi
has been modernized by W. H . Auden. The
effect of the poet's alterations has been to date the play more securely
than history had yet done. He has made it into a period-piece, accentu–
ating its peculiarities by adding horrors and pathos of his own: dead
bodies fall out of armoires where wax effigies were shown through a
