Punch/Volume 147/Issue 3818/At the Play
"Outcast."
It is very fresh and delightful of Mr. H. H. Davies to regard seriously the love of a man for a maid. North of the river and west of Temple Bar it is the intrigues of the highly compromised middle-aged which are supposed to be most worthy of attention on the stage. But Mr. Davies (luckily) is never afraid of being young. So he starts us off with a picture of Geoffrey in the clutches of drink and drugs just because Valentine has jilted him. True that when Valentine is finally married to another man Geoffrey is still in love with her, and receives her at midnight in his rooms; but by this time Mr. Davies has given us three excellent Acts in his own best manner.
And these Acts are hardly concerned with the love of Geoffrey for Valentine at all, but with the relations between Geoffrey and Miriam, a woman of the town. She is, like Geoffrey, an outcast; but she has all the good qualities which he lacks, and she is brave and loving enough to drag him from the pit into which he was sinking. He rewards her by chasing after Valentine again (now tired of her husband)—and also by getting Mr. Davies, as I thought, a little way out of his element.
The solution of this less common triangle—man, mistress, other man's wife—I must leave to the author to reveal to you. Meanwhile I thank him for an absorbing play, in which the two chief characters were extremely well worked out. Perfectly played by Mr. Gerald du Maurier and Miss Ethel Level, they were two very human people.
By the way, in one respect Outcast must easily break all records. Never have so many stage cigarettes been lit (and thrown away) in the course of an evening. I wish that somebody who reads this and is tempted to pay a visit to Wyndham's would let me know the full number. I began counting too late.