THE DRAMA OF THE DUSTBIN.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 7071, 12 April 1901, Page 2

THE DRAMA OF THE DUSTBIN.

Mr Clement Scott, poetaster, dramatic critic and professional litterateur dn general, has a reputation as a coiner of apt alliterative phrases, which ihe studies to retain. "The Drama of the Dustbin" is his epigrammatic description of > the much-discussed "Mr and Mrs Davenfcry." And it has impelled an anonyarious David, who signs himself "Max," in a leader to the " Saturday Review," 'to administer a very severe rebuke to the flippant writer. He urges that the phraseiis ill-applied, and that the play which has so shocked Mr Scott and others of the critics was a serious reflection of life, and that its " showy " situation was purged of offence by the fact that it was a necessary episode in the development of certain realistic characters. If Mr Scott sought a.- subject to fit the pretty phrase he has coined he might, " Max " thinks, have found it better at the Garrick, where "Peril," an adaptation of Sardou's " Nos Intimes " nightly " wafts to our nostrils its faint unwholesome savour." Sardou uses the same material as Mr Har.ris : — £1) the elderly married man, (2) the juvenile wife, (3) the young man intervening. He gives the identical situation, of " Mr and Mrs Daventry" — a man violently "tempting" an unwilling married lady in a locked drawingroom. Bub, this critic of a critic forcefully discriminates, Sardou gives nothing but an unmeaning representation of illicit sensuality, whereas to Mr Harris the situation is merely a means to an intellectual end. His manipulation of his characters is fresh and vital ; Sardou simply " dumps them down upon the boards, and proceeds to show us what might happen if a door were locked and a window were open, and if a chair were overturned and a bell-rope snapped in two, and if the shutters closed easily from within, and the balcony were twenty feet above the ground, and if a lady's maid had gone to bed and a family doctor was still sitting up." Mr Harris's "situation" sprang from the natural development of his story ; Sardou's story was framed to lead up to the door-cum-window-cum-shutters-cum-chair-oum-bell-rope - cum-lady's-maid-cum - family - doctor accident. There- seems to be a nicety of nastiness in this "dust-bin" which Mr Scott has so rashly op ene<^» which makes the layman wonder if this rummaging in its "stale and negligible refuse" achieves any good ; end to compensate for its present unwholesomeness. The fact that "Mr and Mrs Daventry " should have been naughty purely by force of literary circumstances is hardly a justification of their creation, any more than the construction of " Nos Inthnes " as an appreciation that naughtiness lends itself to literary treatment is a proper defence for that apparently risky play.