"SUCCESS" IS PLEASANT BUT NOT REMARKABLE

The following pre-review of the Harvard Dramatic Club's production "Success" which opens tonight was written for the Crimson by a member of the English Department who prefers to remain anonymous.

After its blithe trip into musical entertainment, the Harvard Dramatic Club faces the necessity of immediately reiterating its policy of producing honest dramas heretofore unseen in America, and wisely choses a little known play by a well-known playwright for its fall production. Milne is safe; he raises no over-serious moral issues--although it is hoped that "Success" may drive a few additional nails into the coffin of American Babbitry.

The plot of the piece concerns the momentary romantic lapse of a British Cabinet Minister, Mr. Maddock, who has so closely applied himself to his career that he has forgotten how to dream. His own marriage and his elder daughter's were arranged solely for his political advantage.

In the first act he weans his weak-kneed son from a dawning individuality to a minor post in his deadening little world of public success. But his memory has been prodded by the appearance of his school-days chum; and when he goes to make an important speech in the shires he sleeps in the bedroom which was the headquarters of his early dream-world. He dreams; his beloved Sally is there as always. In the morning he finds his "beauteous maiden" seated on the garden wall, so romantically like the dream that he renounces his career, and the high likelihood of the Prime Minister's portfolio, resolved at last to grasp the romance which his youth promised. He returns to London to bring his affairs to a close, and the reader may guess whether success closes in on him again.

If the Dramatic Club's performance is tame, it is certainly the faultiness of the play, not of the production. Mr. Goodnow, who knows his theatre, has done all that is humanly possible to fill up the cracks in Milue's poor construction with good directorial coment. The result is a good production of a faulty, but not uninteresting play Act I is dull writing: in Act II Milne strains our imagination and the physical possibilities of the stage in the arrangement of the dream scene. Act III is almost worthy of Milne as we have come to know his fine abilities. Visually the production is admirable the stage settings and the lighting express the play beautifully and with taste.

The Dramatic Club should offer Mr. Goodnow more than a chance to be the successful doctor of Milne's drippled brain-child