MACBETH IN BUSINESS

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXV, Issue 160, 22 June 1935, Page 14

MACBETH IN BUSINESS

Priestly Duplicates a Plot

“CORNELIUS” HIS BEST PLAY

Unlike history, Mr J. B. Priestley does not repeat himsell. It is fashionable and indeed the ob'vlous comment to make on his work that he is the most versatile of all contemporary English writers for the stage. His first play, “The Good Companions,” was compact of Dickensian characters and inconsequence; his second, “Dangerous Corner,” was as ingeniously contrived as an Ibsen piece, but had no charadters to speak of; his third, “Laburnum Grove,” had both characters and plot, neither, however, being suited to the other, while his fourth play, “Eden End,” was an essay in atmosphere. There is no other living English dramatist who can show a record as varied as this, comments a London review. But if Mr Priestley docs not repeat himself,.ho has come nearer to doing so in his latest work, “Cornelius,” than in anything which ho has previously written. At the same time, “Cornelius” is easily his best play. Mr Priestley is a novelist as well as a playwright, and in one of his novels, “Angel Pavement,” may be found the precise scene of “Cornelius.” There one gets, exactly as in the play, the poky little business office, the dirty window panes, the heavy ledgers and account books, the dust and charwomen and typists and casual visitors and travelling salesmen and the sulky office boy, which are one section of the commercial life of London.

But between the play and the book there is a vital difference. That difference is Cornelius himself. Mr Priestley has written the play for Mr Ralph Richardson, and Mr Richardson’s personality has doubtless had a good deal to do with the shaping of the character. He is a Shakespearean actor with a voice magnificently rich, who makes the speaking of a rhetorical passage a joy and a delight to the ear. Bearing this in mind, Mr Priestley has made Cornel-

ius, the junior partner in the failing firm of Briggs and Murrison, aluminium importers, a man of leaping imagination, with the root of poetry in him, a veritable Macbeth of the counting house. Almost any topic—a plate glass window or a draper’s shop in South Devon—is sufficient to furnish a springboard for his rhetoric. And superbly does Mr Richardson take his plunges. There is no character so vital as Cornelius in “Angel Pavement.” The story is of the decline and fall of Briggs and Murrison. Murrison is away on a last desperate drive in the north of England for the orders that will save the firm from bankruptcy. He is, says Cornelius, a marvellous man and a wonder, and hopes run high that he will come back with the commissions that will «<»ve off defeat. Even when he sends stmnge telegrams and has not arrived when the hour of the creditors’ meeting comes, Cornelius’s confidence in him is unimpaired. Grandly he withstands the jibes and taunts of the creditors, standing up for his partner’s integrity and zeal. Then Murrison enters, and it is seen at once that he is out 'f hia mind. The business has collapsed. And in the last act it seems likely that Cornelius will collapse with it. But he is not that sort of man. At the very end of the play he hurls a ledger through the office window, and walks off the stage with the swaggering stride of one to whom a couple of bankruptcies o r so are the very thing needed to give him an appetite for breakfast.