THEATRE TEARS

Wanganui Herald, Volume LIII, Issue 160733, 20 August 1920, Page 11

THEATRE TEARS

WEEPING AUDIENCES. LONDON, July 25. It is a strange sight to see a West End audience frankly give itself over to crying, but it happens daily at the Haymarket Theatre, where “Mary Rose” is being played. Mary Rose has been lost for 25 years. So wonderfully has Sir James Barrie written the play that it does not strike you as at all impossible that she would have heard the call of the Scot’s island and stayed away all that tim*. Everything is amazingly Veal and just as things might happen. No one cries when she vanishes, but when Mr Robert Loraine, who is Mary Rose’s sailor husband, reads that she is coming back, emotion takes possession of the house. Women weep openly and unconstrainedly, men pretend to blow their noses. It is remarkable in so distinguished a theatre. Mary Rose, who is really that high priestess of emotional acting, Miss Fay Compton, cannot understand things at all when she returns home. Her pathetic appeals to everyone to explain—“Be nice, Simon; be nice,” she pleads, putting her head on her husband’s shoulder just as an unhappy child might—bring more tears to those sitting and watching. Her simple, piteous voice, her forlorn youth in a world which has grown 25 years older while she has stood still, strike a chord that only tears can respond to. In all parts of the dimly lighted, theatre the sobs of women can he caught, the fluttering of handkerchiefs sensed. Not for many years has any West End play so affected those who go to it as does “Mary Rose.” The audience takes a long time after the curtain has fallen on Mary Rose leaving her baby (grown into a soldier whom she does not know) for the island which calls her only again to leave the scene of such quaint conceit and beautiful pathos for the reality of the sun flooded June afternoon streets. And, unlike most audiences, they are very quiet. Perhaps they do not fully trust their voices. A good thing has many imitations. Order “Nazol” by name. Refuse substitutes. No cold is NassoLproof.