Punch/Volume 147/Issue 3824/At the Play
"The Cost."
Mr. Samuel Woodhouse, of the middle classes, being anxious to distract his son John during the critical moments of Mrs. John's confinement, relates how, in similar circumstances more directly affecting himself, he had been playing tennis, and the strain of the crisis had quite put him off his game. The little jest is, of course, adapted from the familiar lines:—
"I was playing golf the day
When the Germans landed..."
It is of material interest not so much because it is borrowed (for it is not the only joke that Mr. Thurston has conveyed) as because it serves as a brief epitome of the play. For the thing started with the War, and we were getting on quite well with it when an element of obstetrics was introduced and became inextricably interwoven with the original design. Indeed it went further and affected the destinies of the country at large. For England had to wait till the baby was born before it could secure its father's services as the most unlikely recruit in the kingdom.
But you must hear more about this John. He was an intellectual who threatened to achieve the apex of literary renown with a work in two volumes (a third was to follow) on the Philosophy of Moral Courage. At the outbreak of the present war he was at once torn asunder between his duty to his country and his duty to himself. The latter seemed to have the greater claim upon him, and this view was encouraged by an officer who found himself billeted upon the Woodhouse ménage. The dilemma had already worried John (and us) a good deal even before the extension of the age limit made him roughly eligible for the army. Indeed I never quite gathered what it was that ultimately decided him to enlist. Anyhow, six months later he received a bullet in the head, and the wound, though I am glad to say that he survived it, left him incapable of any further intellectual strain.
That was "the cost" of the war to him. Its cost to us (in the play) was almost as heavy. For John's head still retained such a command of brain power that he contrived to be very fluent over his theories of war in general, theories not likely to he of any vital service at a time when our men of fighting age are wanted to act and not think.
I give little for Mr. Thurston's generalities (his talk of "hysteria," which was never a British foible, showed his lack of elementary observation), but the character of John intrigued me as a fair example of the type of egoist, very common among quite good fellows, who is more concerned to satisfy his own sense of the proper thing to do than to consider in what way, less romantic perhaps, he can best devote to the service of his country the gifts with which nature has endowed him.
The play went very well for the first two Acts. The various members of the Woodhouse family were excellently differentiated. The father (played with admirable humour by Mr. Frederick Ross) bore bravely the shock to his trade, and took a manly but quite ineffectual part in household duties for which he had no calling. His lachrymose wife (Miss Mary Rose) was a sound example of the worst possible mother of soldiers. John we know, and Mr. Own Nares knew him too, and very thoroughly. John's wife (I can't think how she came to marry him) had the makings of an Amazon and would gladly have spared her husband for Kitchener's Army at the earliest moment. Her part was played very sincerely and charmingly by Miss Barbara Everest. John's eldest sister regretted the war because she had some nice friends in Germany, but she caught the spirit of menial service from her sisters, of whom the younger was a stage-flapper of the loudest. Finally the second son (Mr. Jack Hobbs) was a nut who began with his heart in his socks but shifted it later into the enemy's trench.
Perhaps the best performance of all—though it had little to do with the war and nothing to do with child-birth—was that of Miss Hannah Jones as Mrs. Pinhouse, a perfect peach of a cook. There were also two characters played off. One was a maid-servant who declined to come to family prayers on the ground of other distractions. I admired her courage. The other was Michael, the precious infant whose entry into the world had occupied so much of our evening. Everybody on the stage had to have a look at him. I felt no such desire. He bored me.
For a play that made pretence to a serious purpose there was far too much time thrown away on more trivialities. At first the exigencies of the stage demanded compression. The news of the ultimatum to Germany, the mobilisation, the rush to enlist, the attack on Germany's commerce, were all stuffed into the space of a few minutes. But the whole of the Third Act (laid in the kitchen) was wantonly wasted over the thinnest of domestic humour. There is a light side, thank Heaven, even to war; but Mr. Thursday had a great chance of doing serious good and he has only half used it. I am certain (though he may call me a prig for saying it) that if he had set himself to serve his country's cause through the great influence which the theatre commands, he could have done better work than this; and he ought to have done it.