GALSWORTHY'S PLAY A SATIRE OF PRESS

The following review of the Dramatic Club's latest production "The Show", playing at Brattle Hall tonight and Friday and at the Fine Arts Theatre Saturday, was written for the Crimson by Professor A. R. Lovejoy, Director of the Cambridge School of the Drama.

For the second time in five years a play by Galsworthy, new to American audiences, finds its way to the public through a non-professional theatre. Five years ago the Kenneth Sawyer Goodman Memorial Theatre of the Chicago Art Institute presented the American premier of "The Forest". Last night the Harvard Dramatic Club gave the first performance in America of "The Show".

The play lampoons the press, the police, and the great news reading, scandal mongering public. A prominent and respected citizen, a flying hero of the late war, is found dead, shot through the heart with his own revolver which he clutches in his hand. It is apparently a clear case of suicide, and yet there seems to be no motive. It is known that he wrote a letter a few minutes before his death and that the letter was posted by the maid. The police work on the theory that the letter may hold the clue-the hidden motive. The press believe that in exposing the secret lives of the dead man and his wife, the truthful reasons for his shuffling off will out. The police must discover a motive. The press must give the public the truth. In their ruthless, brutal search for this motive, this truth the "news" the police and press "make a show of it," the police for justice and the press "as a safe-guald against injustice." Lady Morecombe, the widowed mother of the dead man, appeals to the Editor of the particular yellow sheet which is most concerned with making a major scandal of the lamentable affair. "You want to sell your paper," she says, "and because of that, my son, who can't defend himself, is to be blackened his affairs hawked about the streets." The Editor "It's hardly as simple as that. We do want to sell our paper, of course. A Press that doesn't pay its way can't live. But if there's a villain in the piece, it's the public, Lady Morecombe not us."

And so with the help of the Police and the Press the man in the street and the women at the bridge table are given "the dirt." Nothing is left unexposed in the private lives of husband and wife, her love, and his mistress. Anne: "My husband has a mother, to whom he was a hero." The Reporter: "Oh? Could you give me her address?"

And the public is satisfied. With the inquest the show is over. The letter in the hands of the dead man's best friend arrives too late with it's explanation to save the family from the sensation seekers.

The Dramatic Club Players, a cast of thirty, take their play very seriously. Their acting is always very much in earnest. Many of the parts are of the kind which call for what is curiously referred to at times as "emotional acting." As though all acting were not emotional. Young actors might learn by watching their elders and betters on the stage that the more genuine and deeply rooted the emotion on the part of the actor, the less obvious it will be to the audience that he is terribly aware of the fact that he is playing an "emotional part."

The settings are more than adcouste. The last act set in the waiting room of the Coreners Court is particularly good