MODERN LIFE

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21975, 26 December 1936, Page 13

MODERN LIFE

NEW PLAYS’ BY ST. JOHN ERVINE (i) People of Onr Class. A Comedy in Three Acts, (li) Boyd’s Shop. A Comedy iu Four Acts. By St. John Ervine. Alien and Unwin. 112 and 118 pp. (3/6 net each.) Plays about the contemporary scene are the most difficult to write convincingly. A fantasy, a social comedy, or a dish of provincial quiddities sewed up to tickle urban appetites—these deal,with elements that are strange to most readers and playgoers, dnd consequently are accepted at face value. But when the dramatist touches modern times, representing people of the sort that everybody is expected to know, face values are no longer acceptable. The reader or playgoer knows, or think.s he knows, and will stand for nothing artificial. This perhaps accounts for the reluctance of managers to accept “People of our Class,” one of two new plays by St. John Ervine, for production. Mr Ervine has made this reluctance the subject of a preface in defence of his play, denying that hip modern young people are exaggerated, and that sudden conversion by the Salvation Army is an unnatural solution for the troubles of an aristocratic war-derelio|. The preface also reveals that the first two pages of the play are “journeyman’s work” contributed by Bernard Shaw. On the whole it appears that the managers are right; for the play, although it reads entertainingly, does not ring true. Mr Ervine takes a family of the kind that has always been army or navy, and shows it in contact with times that have destroyed its safety. The general's investments give a steadily shrinking income; his son, grown up without training for a job because of his war service, is becoming a neurotic ne’cr-do-wcll, and his daughter has fallen in love with the village chemist. The purpose of Mr Ervine’s play is to show what is happening to people of the general’s class, and their bewilderment at it all. He succeeds partly; but his general is no more than a symbol, and his shocking young people, so very outspoken about distasteful subjects, never give the impression of being normal. The climax, with the son resolving his neuroses in the faith of the Salvation Army, does not satisfy, because the reader is not prepared for it; it is not a natural outcome of preceding events. The truth appears to be that Mr Ervine has shown well enough the chaos into which the general’s world is shaken, but does not go on to shake a new coherence out of chaos. In “Boyd’s Shop” Mr Ervine returns to the Ulster village of his earlier work. It is a comedy of country manners, yet not of the deliberately rustic school, and its people—Andrew Boyd the grocer, his daughter Agnes, the young grocer John Haslett, and the garrulous Miss McClurg—are good plain folk of the sort to be met with in any township. Agnes admires the newly-arrived young minister, and will have nothing to do with the too pushing young grocer. Slowly it is revealed that the minister cares for nothing but ambition, and will use any means to further it, and while the grocer’s fortunes go more aha more awry, Agnes finds herself thinking more and more about the grocer. As social documents of our time both “Boyd’s Shop” and “People of our Class” are interesting. Yet there is a considerable difference between them. Everything that happens in “Boyd’s Shop is the effect of the people of the play on each other; but “People of our Class” shows the effect on its people of outside forces and what happens has very little to do with the interaction of those people. The one play is about people, and the other about an abstraction—the decay of the upper middle class. “Boyd’s Shop” has the vitality that “People of our Class,” for all its cleverness and all its good intentions, lacks. Its humour goes deeper, its situations are more true to common humanity, and it tells a more convincing tale. Some of the things Mr Ervine does in it have been done by other dramatists; but that does hot deprive him of the doing them exceedingly well. If Mr Ervine wants to be remembered as having written a good play about the contemporary scene, “Boyds Shop” will serve his purpose.