Children of Darkness

In spite of its manifest and manifold weaknesses, Mr. Edwin Justus Mayer's muddled and misbegotten pastiche persists in being perversely entertaining. Mr. Mayer has attempted something so vast and fascinating that even in its failure, shadows of success can be seen intermittently dancing: cleverness shadowing forth brilliance, and excitement grandeur.

Children of Darkness is couched in Mr. Mayer's approximation of the elegant, cynical wit which the English Restoration famously bequeathed to the eighteenth century. It is set in an annex to the Newgate jail, where the villains of The Beggar's Opera sang like caged birds. Yet it obstreperously violates a cardinal rule of the genre to which it aspires to belong: the rule that says that no character may be endowed with the ability to feel profound and communicable pain. The picturesque discomfiture and knavery that are familiar and amusing in Congreve and Gay are gradually, in Mr. Mayer's scheme, to be exposed as the sort of deep corruption which only the most sombre tragedy will generally attempt to plumb. The diamond-pointed cutting-tools of the Age of Wit are to be used to lay bare the dark reality of metaphysical evil. Think of Congreve trying to be Dostoevsky--better, think of a Broadway playwright of the 1920's, which Mr. Mayer was when he wrote Children of Darkness, trying to be both.

His talents are more or less unequal to his ambitions in every respect. His pseudo-Congreve is often pretty good--it is certainly one of the chief pleasures the play provides--but it often sounds self-conscious and sometimes resembles a parody of a bad historical novel. (A line like, "By gad, sir, she's as pretty a wench as ever I bedded!" seems right out of Forever Under.) Moreover, in his attempt to expand the scope of the eighteenth-century style to accommodate his expanded purpose, he resorts to frequent bursts of the stiffest, most intolerably pretentious sort of "fine writing."

There is no sign in Mr. Mayer of the uncompromising toughness of mind needed for the task he sets himself. For all his surface cynicism he is worm-eaten with sentimentality. Whenever he tries to rationalize the situations he creates, to give the audience a perspective on the action, the sentimentality crops out depressingly. Because of it, many moments that are supposed to be touching come close to being laughable.

Fortunately, a third-rate intellect is not necessarily an altogether negligible artist. When Mr. Meyer conceptualizes his subject matter, he is lost; by embodying it directly in his characters, he makes Children of Darkness strangely compelling. It is not through what he tells us, but through what he shows us, that we catch a glimpse of evil as an absolute, an ingrained disposition towards total selfishness, a combination of the willingness and the ability to blight lives, rather than a mere evaluation derived from totaling up a number of acts. At moments, evil lives on Mr. Mayer's stage; if we are never able to understand it, we can feel it as each of the characters strives to get possession of another's worldly goods or body or soul. This living principle of evil generates a sense that something important is at stake in all these deftly tangled intrigues.

Trying to create characters with the sheen of surface and intensity of innard required to support his conception, Mr. Mayer has miscarried in one important direction. The young poet who represents innocence against both its opposites is an egregious failure. He spouts fine writing of one sort or another almost every moment he is on stage, and makes himself constantly obnoxious by being out of period and out of it generally: a verbose, stupid, and mawkish cub.

The vicious characters, jailers and jailed, are often splendid company, though the protagonist, who calls himself Count La Ruse, is bedeviled by his author's insistence that, like the Pirates of Penzance, he is an authentic and fundamentally virtuous nobleman "who has gone wrong." His vis-a-vis, the jailer's daughter, is a salty bit of mutton, a lively dollop of trollop, when she is not made to work at it too hard. Other scoundrels are beautifully done, notably an ineffable poisoner who comes at first glance amazingly close to success in his function of representing Unashamed Ultimate Evil.

As is well-known, highly-styled comedy is just the sort of thing Americans can't play and neither the weaknesses nor the uniqueness of Children of Darkness are calculated to make it easier. Unaccountably, the production at the Charles Playhouse under Michael Murray's intelligent direction is quite a creditable one. Nicholas Coster as the young poet is even more annoying than the necessities of the part demand, and somewhat less young, but he and S. Harris Young as a subsidiary scoundrel are the only melancholy exceptions.

Louis Edmonds makes an impressive figure of the pivotal peculator Count La Ruse. His control and taste lapse only at rare moments, and he has considerable authority, elegance, and brio besides. As his mistress and nemesis, Robin Howard is asked to cope with a part that calls for the sort of compelling distinction that Siobhan McKenna and Colleen Dewhurst and very few others can command. On this level Miss Howard simply hasn't got it, but she is a competent actress with a splendid pair of shoulders. Lee Henry is similarly undefinitive but competent as Ultimate Evil. Arthur Malet cannot quite fit his occasional moments of menace into the prevailing pixyishness of his interpretation, but his picturesque, toothless old jailer is an exquisitely professional job.

Sidney Bennett's tricky lighting that works, and a good set by Robert G. Skinner are other elements of a production that does nothing to obscure either the merits or the deficiencies of a play that has qualities of both.