Last week gave one an amusing opportunity of contrasting the merits and the defects of the professional and the unprofessional kind of play.  “The Gay Lord Quex” was revived at the Duke of York’s Theatre, and Mr. Alexander produced at the St. James’s Theatre a play called “The Finding of Nancy,” which had been chosen by the committee of the Playgoers’ Club out of a large number of plays sent in for competition.  The writer, Miss Netta Syrett, has published one or two novels or collections of stories; but this, as far as I am aware, is her first attempt at a play.  Both plays were unusually well acted, and therefore may be contrasted without the necessity of making allowances for the way in which each was interpreted on the stage.

Mr. Pinero is a playwright with a sharp sense of the stage, and eye for what is telling, a cynical intelligence which is much more interesting than the uncertain outlook of most of our playwrights.  He has no breadth of view, but he has a clear view; he makes his choice out of human nature deliberately, and he deals in his own way with the materials that he selects.  Before saying to himself:  what would this particular person say or do in these circumstances? he says to himself:  what would it be effective on the stage for this particular person to do or say?  He suggests nothing, he tells you all he knows; he cares to know nothing but what immediately concerns the purpose of his play.  The existence of his people begins and ends with their first and last speech on the boards; the rest is silence, because he can tell you nothing about it.  Sophy Fullgarney is a remarkably effective character as a stage-character, but when the play is over we know no more about her than we should know about her if we had spied upon her, in her own way, from behind some bush or keyhole.  We have seen a picturesque and amusing exterior, and that is all.  Lord Quex does not, I suppose, profess to be even so much of a character as that, and the other people are mere “humours,” quite amusing in their cleverly contrasted ways.  When these people talk, they talk with an effort to be natural and another effort to be witty; they are never sincere and without self-consciousness; they never say inevitable things, only things that are effective to say.  And they talk in poor English.  Mr. Pinero has no sense of style, of the beauty or expressiveness of words.  His joking is forced and without ideas; his serious writing is common.  In “The Gay Lord Quex” he is continually trying to impress upon his audience that he is very audacious and distinctly improper.  The improprieties are childish in the innocence of their vulgarity, and the audacities are no more than trifling lapses of taste.  He shows you the interior of a Duchess’s bedroom, and he shows you the Duchess’s garter, in a box of other curiosities.  He sets his gentlemen and ladies talking in the allusive style which you may overhear whenever you happen to be passing a group of London cabmen.  The Duchess has written in her diary, “Warm afternoon.”  That means that she has spent an hour with her lover.  Many people in the audience laugh.  All the cabmen would have laughed.