THE THEATRE
CHINESE metaphysics, no less, are a counterpart for Miss Marie Tempest in A Serpent's Tooth. Explaining the genesis of an article on this subject:
"'He read, sir,' rejoined Pott, laying his hand on Mr Pickwick's knee, and looking round with a smile of intellectual superiority—'he read for metaphysics under the letter M, and for China under the letter C, and combined his information, sir!'"
So the producers who knew that there was Miss Tempest and who had, for less observable reasons, a play by Mr Arthur Richman, and who combined their information, quite regardless of the fact that whatever the merits of the play they were not such as Miss Tempest needed to waste her talents upon. If ever in our time there were a voice and gesture to point frivolity and insouciance, if ever on our stage an intelligence which could be sophisticated and dazzling, they are hers; and it is a hideous mistake to put these talents to the service of a play in which even the old sentimentalities are not freshly observed and taken to heart, but are taken on trust.
Mr Richman's play is much better than Ambush was; his actual feeling for comedy is great and the light passages are frequently pleasant; but like Mr Somerset Maugham whom he resembles in other ways, he seems to feel it a duty to be serious at moments, and his seriousness is not high. The evening, therefore, rested on Miss Tempest who impresses us—she has always done so—as the most gifted of actresses. She has such energy, such vitality, and such abounding, amazing, adorable carelessness. She crosses a room as one going to be crowned or crucified, and it matters not at all that she points her speeches and holds her final consonants and is, in effect, of the older, sharper, and more theatrical generation. Mr Richman's sense of milieu (the best thing in Ambush) quite deserted him, and with Mr Leslie Howard assisting Miss Tempest, and with the old-hat idea of the rotter going out into the open spaces to reform, one didn't know whether one was in England or America. It didn't matter much, since one remained positively embraced in the warmth of Miss Tempest's humour and intelligence.
