Punch/Volume 147/Issue 3832/At the Play
"The Man Who Stayed at Home."
No, he was not a shirker, as you thought. Nor was he engaged in making munitions of war, or khaki, or woollens, or military boots, or in exporting cocoa to the enemy via neutral Holland—that roaring monopoly of the Pacificist. His business was to spy at spies—a task that called for as much coolness and courage as any job at the Front. And so when the officious flapper presented him with a white feather he had no use for it except as pipe-cleaner.
For his purpose Christopher Brent had taken up his residence at a "select boarding establishment" on the East Coast, which contained the following members of the German Secret Service: Mrs. Sanderson, proprietress; Carl, her son, clerk in the British Admiralty; Fräulein Schroeder, boarder, and Fritz, waiter. Their design, if I rightly penetrated its darkness, was to give information of the whereabouts of a certain section of the Expeditionary Force which was "coming through from the North"; to supply Berlin with plans of the coast defences; and finally to give a signal to a German submarine by the firing of the house, which would incidentally mean the roasting alive of its innocent contents. All this (for the sake of Aristotle and the Unities) was to take place in a single day, though I for one could not believe that either the pigeon post or the ordinary mail would be equal to the strain.
Their utensils included a Marconi instrument concealed in the chimney; a bomb; a revolver; maps of the minefield and harbour; a carrier-pigeon, and a knife for disposing of the cliff-sentry.
To frustrate their schemes something more ws needed than the wit of Brent and his ally, the widow Leigh; something more, even, then his skill in shooting pigeons in flight with an air-rifle. The vacuum was supplied by the crass stupidity of the Emperor's minions. Even when full credit is given to Brent for letting his bath overflow so as to flood the public salon and render it untenable, it was surely unwise of Mrs. Sanderson to offer her private parlour for the use of the boarders on the very day set apart for the execution of her plans which were centred in this room. It was also gross carelessness on the part of her son, when he had Brent, with hands up, at his mercy, to place his own revolver on the table and to use, in exchange, the unloaded weapon which he had taken from this opponent's pocket. It was puerile, too, to accept without proof the verbal assurances of the widow Leigh that she was one of themselves, a loyal German spy. And Fritz committed an unpardonable error in giving away the site of the Marconi apparatus by his undisguised suspicion of anybody who took any interest in the fireplace.
And so their schemes all went agley; the whole pack was arrested; and when the curtain fell on a happy group of boarders in midnight déshabille there was every promise that the misdemeanants would receive a month's improsonment or at least a caution to be of good behaviour in the future.
"Hands up!"
"Hands up yourself!"
Carl Sanderson Mr. Malcolm Chery.
Christopher Brent Mr. Dennis Eadie.
I understand, on good authority, that the tendency of the public at this juncture of the War is to demand light refreshment. Well, they have it here. For, though the subject deals with a serious problem of the hour, it can be treated, and is treated, with a very permissible humour that just stops short of farce. Some of the stage-devices, as I am assured by my betters, may have a touch of antiquity, but their application is as modern as can well be, and I should indeed be ungrateful if after an entertainment so smoothly and dexterously administered I were to be captious about origins or other matters of pedantry.
Mr. Dennis Eadie, as Brent, both in his real character of detective and in the assumed futility of his disguise as a genial idiot, was equally excellent, and again proved his gift for quick-change artistry. Miss Mary Jerrold's Fräulein Schroeder was extraordinarily Teutonic in all but her quiet humour, which she seemed to have caught from the country of her adoption. The Fritz of Mr. Henry Edwards was another delightful sketch, though his actual German birth and his allegation of Dutch nationality were both belied by the red Italian corpuscles with which the authors had inoculated him. Miss Jean Cadell, as usual, played a pale and fatuous spinster, but this time, in the part of Miss Myrtle, she had her chance, and seized it bravely. When that typical British boarder, Mr. John Preston, M.P. (interpreted with great relish and vigour by Mr. Hubert Harben), remarked, "I call a spade spade," she replied, "And I suppose you would call a dinner-napkin a serviette"—one of the pleasantest remarks in a play where the good things said were many and unforced.
I have not mentioned the admirable performance—its merits might easily be missed—of Mr. Stanley Logan as a Territorial Tommy; or the very natural manners of Mrs. Robert Brough as Mrs. Sanderson; or the quiet art of Miss Ruth Mackay in a part (Miriam Leigh) that offered a too-limited scope to her exceptional talents. Miss Isobel Elsom contributed her share of the rather perfunctory love-interest with a very pretty sincerity; and Mr. Malcolm Cherry, in the ungrateful part of the spy Carl, did his work soundly, with a lofty sacrifice of his own obvious good-nature. Indeed, it was a very excellent cast.
I should like to congratulate the authors, Messrs. Lechmere Worrall and Harold Terry, on having given the public what they want, without lapsing into banality. The attraction of the first two Acts was not, perhaps, fully sustained in the third, but they gave us quite a cheerful evening; and at the fall of the curtain the audience was so importunate in their applause that Mr. Dennis Eadie had to break it to them that, though the loss of their company would give him pain, he thought the time had come for them to go away.
I did not notice Mr. Reginald McKenna in the stalls, but it was a great night for him and the Home Office.
O. S.