“Mrs. Moonlight”

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 584, 9 February 1929, Page 24

“Mrs. Moonlight”

Tragic Theme Treated Sentimentally BENN LEVY’S NEW PLAY Bsnn Levy, author of “This Woman Business” and “Mud and Treacle,” has written a new play, “Mrs. Moonlight,” for which a successful career is prophesied by London critics. He calls his play “a piece of pastiche,” presumably to disarm those who might say that his work had a derivation in Barrie. Its central idea is that a young married woman, realising at the age of 2S that she still looks as if she were 21, understands that she is fated never to grow any older in physical appearance. While her husband, her friends and —w arst of all—her baby daughter advance in years, she will always look little more than a pretty child; every one will regard her as unnatural and treat her as a witch. So she runs away and allows it to be supposed that she is dead. This is in 1881. Seventeen years later, when the family is expecting a young niece of hers to visit them, she comes in the niece’s place, stays long enough to save her own daughter from an unworthy lover, and departs again. She reappears once more in 1925. Her daughter is now a grey-haired woman; her grandson has come down from Oxford; her husband is over 90 and has reached a stage at which he fails to recognise anyone. But in the young girl who reappears he recognises his own wife, without any sense of tt e lapse of time. She puts on the dress she used'to wear; she sings the song she used to sing; she comforts the old fellow on his deathbed; and at last dies herself, still young, still beautiful.

Tie play Is obviously a pretty, pathetic dressing-up of a terrible aud tragic theme, used tragically by Swift in his account of the Struldbrugs during Ihe Laputan voyage. The Struldbrugs were immortals; they grew old but could not die. This girl grew old at heart, but not in appearance. There is a passage in which Mr. Levy has touched upon the terror of his subject—a passage in which he makes the girl speak of the horror of being continually courted as a young girl long after all taste for courtship was dead. L T pon this follows the scene in which the girl, a middle-aged woman at hear), forces herself to allure her daughter’s lover so that her daughter may be saved from him. What a tierce, intolerable irony there might be in this, if Mr. Levy had faced the truth of it! Then he would have" written a great tragedy instead of what he has now written —a popular piece of smiles and tears. The smiles are many and extraordinarily pleasant, and the tears —yes, it may be fooiish and critically unsound to weep over such a piece as this, but I found it impossible to do otherwise, writes a London critic of “Mrs:. Moonlight.” You remember “Milestones?” You remember “Mary Rose ?” Mix them together and add a humour and a sentimental ingenuity of Mr. Levy's own, and you have this play Tte piece is remarkably well acted, particularly by Leon Quartermaine and Joan Barry.

This evening at His Majesty's Theatre the memorable VanbrughBoucicault season will end, and Auckland audiences can bid farewell to two famous stage folk. It is a great pity that the Lonsdale comedy. “The High Road” has been abandoned. The final production this evening will be “Miss Neil o’ New Orleans.” The more one sees “So This Is Love” the firmer sticks the conviction that Cyril Ritchard and Madge Elliott (the Australians) are the shining examples of dancing grace in London, says a London exchange. Miss Elliott had to wait much too long for “discovery.” She literally danced her way to greatness when Laddie Cliff gave her the one great chance in “Lady Luck,” and now at the Winter Garden the comedian and producer has seen his judgment vindicated over and over again.