Life — December 24, 1914 — page 24: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

SE-TRE-E< Christmas “TYRIVEN,” at the Empire, is exasperating, both as a play and in performance. In both particulars it has such excellencies and defects that one wishes, for purposes of easicr classification, it might have been decidedly better or decidedly worse. The best thing about it as a play is that its good points are cumulative. It starts and runs through two acts in the dullest shades of dull grey. Its heroine is the victim of a mysterious disease—so mysterious that the audience is never permitted to know what it is, In this particular “ Driven” differs essentially from “Damaged Goods". Through those two acts every one speaks in dull tones and moves with dull, measured tread. All this is extremely realistic, as the scene is an English household with its head a member of Parliament, who takes his duties seriously, and its safety first provided for by a resident spinster sister of the husband. The customary serving of tea, without which no New Yorker would recognize a play as being really English, was the most startling incident of the two acts. Pl aPRre? a HE always indulgent audience which gathers for an Empire first night sat through the two acts in grim confidence that something must happen in the third, It did. The young wife of the member of Parliament went to a young man’s bachelor apartment. The flippant critics of the humorous sheets, known as New York's daily press, are likely to have fun with the proceedings in that bachelor apartment. In fact, it had the nearest touch to human nature in the whole play. ‘The young man was propriety personified until the lady made it evident that she expected to be made love to, and was not disappointed. Then when a side issue was in line with her coquetry, she expressed a desire for supper. He produces rather an elaborate one, which raises her ire, be- cause it indicates that he was expecting some one, although her coming was largely a matter of chance. The fact that there are four péches Melba on the table rouses her suspicion that he had planned not for a rendezvous, but for a gay party, when all along she had believed that his whole occupation in life was loving her. More ire on the part of the lady. SSeSeee INALLY he convinces her that she is the only woman in the world for him. This starts her on another tangent. She knows now that the gentleman has provided the chicken paté, the champagne and the peaches because he was sure she was coming. That certainly was an insult, and she flounces out. All this was entirely feminine and convincing, save the last, because she was hungry, and her woman's wit would have enabled her to achieve the same result and yet get some of the tempting and untouched supper instead of leaving it to be warmed up for the deserted bachelor’s breakfast. What happens after has to do with a reconciliation with the bachelor, a near elopement and the husband's preven- tion of that catastrophe. Everything leads to a gloriously happy ending, climaxed by the husband's presentation to the wife of an alleged Peke puppy, typifying his recognition of his previous neglect to provide amusement for her. The final curtain goes down with the husband and wife embracing and the puppy occupying the center of the stage and a saucer of milk. It has been hinted before that the interest of the play was cumulative and progressive. Presumably the bachelor is simultaneously consuming the left-over supper provided for the lady who did not elope with him. The exasperating part of the play is that its realism is carried to the point of dullness and that inexpertness in dramatic handling robs the possible situations of their point At moments it seems as though we were going to have some- thing tangible, and then the situation, to use a colloquiali “blows up”. Cg tO HE company is entirely English, including Alexandra Car- lisle, Haidee Wright, Messrs. Charles Bryant, Leslic Faber and Lumsden Hare. The performance of the réles is in the main satisfactory. In ignorance of the disease from which Diana Stafurth, the heroine, was suffering, the audience found her symptoms, as evidenced by Alexandra Carlisle in make-up and other ways, rather confusing, but she was more successful in bringing out the erratic mental processes of a young woman who thinks she has only two years to live and wishes to get some fun out of them. Mr. Bryant as the M. P. husband was sufficiently stolid, and Mr. Faber was ex- tremely discreet and self-contained in the ungrateful role of the bachelor. Haidee Wright has evidently made a micro- scopic study of British spinsterdom. One laudable effort in the training of the company was apparently carried too far. Some one in charge, evidently familiar with the inability of most London actors to get ASTRONOMICAL A NEW STAR