"The Adding Machine."

Waikato Times, Volume 103, Issue 17411, 25 May 1928, Page 5

"The Adding Machine."

A Strange “ExpressionisF’ Play.

Mr Zero is thin, sallow, under-sized, and partially bald; for twenty-five years he has slaved away at a clerk’s desk by day, and by night has sufferad the incessant nagging of his shrewish wife: That, in essence, is the tragedy on which Elmer Rice, a young American writer of melo-drama, has based “The Adding Machine,” a remarkable “expressionist” pUy. 'recently produced by Sir Barry Jackson in London The Underdog. Mr Zero! The zero of humanity: all the bosses and kings of history have left their trade-marks on his back; he hauled stones for the making of the Pyramids: he was a Roman galley-slave on a trireme that swept the Carthaginian fleet from the seas—only, then, he had chest muscles, and biceps. Down he sank tnrough the ages, through serfdom; down and down till, in his Twentieth-Century existence, we see him chained to a desk writing down the figures that a faded little woman calls to him with mechanical precision. Mr Zero! With a wife who prattles incessantly of her hatred of “Western” pictures, and her love for sentimental indcceney. Of what Mrs One told her; of what Mrs Two told her; of what Mrs Three told her. . . For “The Adding Machine” is “expressionist” drama, that queer product of post-War minds which seeks to interpret a character from the objective and subjective points of view; to deal with the half understood “hinterland” thoughts of men. And here—after a bedroom scene with the nagging wife and the atmosphere of hopelessly mediocre minds—the play really begins, at Mr Zero's desk, with the two characters speaking their thoughts out loud. His companion in, unacknowledged, misery is Daisy Devore. “Six dollars,” she calls. “Three fifteen. Two twenty. Sixty-five cents. A dollar twenty. . . Then, lapsing into her thoughts: “I used to think you was stuck on me.” Says Zero:—

“I wonder if I could kill the wife without anybody findin’ out. In bed some night with a pillow. Maybe she’ll die soon. I notice 1 she was coughin’ this mornin’. Then I could do what I damn please. Lots of women would be glad to get me.” And the love-starved Daisy, after an irritated “Aw! Keep quiet?” lapses into thoughts of Mr Zero:“That time at the store picnic—the year your wife couldn’t come—you were nice to me then. We were both together all day. just sittin’ around under the trees. And you sat next me in the big delivery waggon. I wonder what it feels like to be really kissed. Men—dirtv pies! They like the bold ones.’ Yet this particular day is just a little out of the ordinary, for Mr Zero. It is his twenty-fifth anniversary as a pen-driv-er : “I wonder if the boss remembers. I got a hunch there’s a big raise cornin’ to me.

If he don’t come across I’m going right up to the Ironfc office and tell him where he gets off. ‘Boss,’ I’ll say, ‘I want to have a talk with you.’ ‘Sure,’ he’ll say, ‘sit down. Have a corona corona. . .’ ‘Boss,’ I’ll say, ‘I ain’t quite satisfied. I been on this job twenty-five years now, and if I’m gonna stay I gotta see a future ahead of me.’ ” A Brainstorm. And so poor Zero rambles on until the whistle blows and the boss does come in. “We’ve been planning a change in this department for some time,” says the Boss. “I kinda thought you had your eye on me,” replies Zero. Boss: “You were right. The fact is we’re installing adding machines.” Zero: “Addin’ machines?” Boss: “Yes, a mechanical device that adds automatically. . . . They do the work in half the time and a high-school F'rl can operate them. Now, of course, m sorry to lose an old and faithful employee . . . you will draw your salary for the fnll month . . . letter of recommendation . . . greatly regret . . . efficiency . . . economy . . . business . . . business . . . BUSINESS. And the scene ends in the wildest clamour that any playgoer has ever heard: music., wind, waves, sleigh-bells, thnnder, and crashing glass. That is the “expressionistic” way of depicting a brainstorm. The Elysian Fields. Zero kills the boss and is executed; and the second climax of the play takes place in a scene of pastoral loveliness. A graveyard character, Mr Shrdlu (who murdered his mother), is shown sitting with Zero. Shrdlu is in great despair:— “Nothing is turning out as I expected. I saw everything so clearly—the flames, the tortures, an eternity of suffering . . . and it has all turned out so differently. . . No, no, no! It's right and just that I should be punished.” And then there appears Daisy Devore, through her suicide at the death of Zero. She, and the man she loves, sit happily together. For a few moments they begin to hear the eternal music—the music of understanding, one imagines—which Shrdlu cannot hear. But poor Zero’s warped mind cannot |ras]3 the light and gaiety of the Elysian Shrdlu (despairingly) : “All these people here are so strange, so unlike the good people I’ve known. They seem to think of nothing but enjoyment or of wasting their time in profitless occupations. Some paint pictures from morning to night, or carve blocks qf stone. Others write songs, or put words together day in and day out. Still others do nothing but lie under the trees and look at the sky. ...” After a period in a sort of cosmic laundry, Zero is sent back to earth again, memoryless. Says the taskmaster who dispatches him downwards to operate a giant, a wonderful adding machine: “It’s a rotten system—but what are you going to do about it ?”