THE THEATRE IN BOSTON

George Arliss has brought a Barrie play of marked distinction to the Hollis Street Theatre in "The Well Remembered Voice", which is given in conjunction with Hubert Henry Davies' three act comedy, "The Mollusc." A war story with a spiritual theme has to be unusually convincing to hold the interest of the theatre going audience today--the public is rather well fed up now on the war. Yet Barries' play is not only convincing, it is artistic and sets us to metaphysical speculations and analyses, which our ordinary every day life tends to suppress.

The story is of an English father and mother whose son has been killed at the front. All the mother's actions outwardly portray her loss, she is obsessed with the idea of mourning and each night gathers her family together believing that they can receive spiritual messages from the son. The father--George Arliss--however, goes about his business pretty much as before, and people think he does not feel his son's death; indeed his wife, remembering the lack of demonstrative affection between father and son, thinks her husband unable to receive messages from the dead. But it is to his father that the soldier appears, telling him that the dead suffer when the living mourn.

There is more to the play than the obvious moral; that true sorrow takes refuge not outwardly but inwardly, and that death is faced in but one way by going on with our daily life and habits. The swinging of the door that gives entrance to the voice of the son, though we see no body; the way in which the voice moves about the room,--we are convinced by it all until the voice begins to tell how he died and mentions life after death. In that instant the picture is man made; we feel it to be mere speculation and we are disappointed. But somehow Barrie wins us back; henceforth we do not believe that death is like this, yet before the play is over we are as interested as before.

George Arliss, as the father, gives us a remarkably distinguished picture of the British spirit which made it possible for England to go on building more ships and munitions, and sending millions of here sons into battle, when the flower of the nation had died. Mrs. Arliss affords her husband able support, and Olive Tell, as the old sweetheart, is pleasant to look upon.