A STAGE DIVORCE

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 46, 23 August 1926, Page 11

A STAGE DIVORCE

NATIONAL REPERTORY SOCIETY'S SUCCESS

Before a full house in the Concert Chamber of the Town Hall on Saturday evening tho National Repertory Society staged Clemence Dane's three-act play, "A Bill of Divorcement," and repeated the success achieved earlier in Mr. G. B. Shaw's "Pygmalion." The audience was keenly appreciative.

"A Bill o£ Divorcement" hangs on the divorce-for-lunacy motive. The -war-mar-riage o£ Hilary and Margaret Fairfield is followed by his committal, to a mental hospital as a shell-shock ease. Years speed ou, and in 1033 A.D. (the year o£ the play's action) Margaret, in accordance with the then state of the British divorce law, has divorced her husband and is about to marry Gray Meredith. Her flapper daughter, Sydney Fairneld, is an aider and abettor o£ this divoroo and second marriage, and (as representing the advanced spirit of the day) engages in ungloved conflict 'ith her spinster aunt, Hester Fairfield, who opposes the divorce with a bitterness born of the nineteenth century ideas as well as oi her sisterhood with the "mental" husband. The- marriage with Gray Meredith is drawing near when two bombs explode —the husband ia pronounced by the mental hospital to be a nearly-recovered escapee, and his daughter Sydney learns (a little later) that the "mental" flaw precedes the shell-shock and is rooted farther back in the paternal family. From this point onwards mother and daughter are both in mental agony concerning their right to marry—the mother, because the neurotic divorced husband makes raving appeals to her; the daughter, because she holds that, -while shell-shock is not hereditarily transmissible, the other sort of insanity is, wherefore she has no title to become-the wife of the rector's amorous son, Kit Pumphrey. Much of the play pivots, of course, on the husband, Hilary who, as presented by that capable actor, Mr. W. S. Wauchop, appears on the scene as an obvious neurotic, offering little or no corroboration of tho near recovery verdict of the hospital. Tho husband that Mr. Wauchop throws into the story is clearly not tho sort ot person that is entitled to a further effort at cohabitation by a woman who has divorced him after a fifteen years' vigil, and who is now, while still, in her thirties, plighted legally and loyally to another man. But while Margaret Fairfield passes—after a great deal of rather tedious vacillation— to her second husband, her freedom is won only by the slavery of the daughter Sydney, whose horror of the mental flaw compels her to reject her loyer and undertake —as the curtain drops—custodianship of her impossible father. A not very comforting climax. The playwright's treatment of tho subject is always convincing. Tho situations are rather over-wrought, and the play is hysterical in tone, and —worse still —at times is monotonously hysterical. It needs much reserve in tho actors to correct this tendency; and, on the whole, the National Repertory Society has accomplished a difficult task very well. Mr. Wauchop's handling of the neutrotic is masterly, and achieves the double purpose of creating an intensely pathetic atmosphere without establishing any real common-sense case for the continued subjection of his former wife. With the daughter the case is different. There can be no more painful situation in life than the sudden discovery which Sydney Fairfield makes, and which drives her relentlessly to the expelling of her lover after scenes that are altogether incomprehensible to the bewildered male. Miss Molly Plimmer must be congratulated on the spirit, dash, and heart which she infused into this tragedy of a young liiV--the real tragedy of the plot. Equally difficult is the presentation of the complex in which the mother, Margaret Fairfield — self-described as unclever — t'mds herself cast, and that important role was conscientiously and capably filled by Mrs. John Hannah. Hester Fairfield, on the other hand, is practically a. single-track part with good scoring opportunities at regular intervals, which Miss Irene Mason made ample use of, putting 100 per cent, of venom into the acid observations of the husband's sister, whose peculiar genius it is to twist everybody else's motives into an ovil shape. Mr. C. S. Grear and Mr. Frank Burden are the would-be husbands, whose masculine directness is pitiably unequal to the task of following the mental tortuosities of the eternal female. The Rector, who is supposed to typify clerical bigotry in divorce matters, gives Mr. P. B. Broad an opening for a smart bit of characterisation, and the same may bo said of the Doctor as Mr. Todd M'Caw presents him. Mrs. 6. E. Hunter as "Bassett" completes a capable cast.

The National Repertory Society is showing a worthy ambition; it is not afraid of difficult tasks, and the public generally should attend its performances and sympathetically watch its development. The things in which it is already strong, as well as the things in which it is still climbing, are alike of interest. "A Bill of Divorcement" will be repeated in the Concert Chamber of the Town Hall to-night and to-morrow night. • The producer is Mr. Leo dn Chateau, who has produced remarkable results from inexperienced material. Tho entr'acte music is arranged by Mr. Leon de Mauny, and is played by Mrs. Frances Henry and Mr. Keeble Thurkettle, A.T.C.L. Tho scenery is by Mr. \V. Beck.