* * * * *

AT THE PLAY.

“REMNANT.”

I wish now that I had not been compelled to postpone my visit to the Royalty, for I think the fall of Baghdad must have put me a bit above myself.  Anyhow, I was less moved than usual by the triumph of virtue and the downing of vice; and permitted myself to wonder how a play like Remnant ever found its way into the Royalty (of all theatres), and what Mr. DENNIS EADIE (of all actors) was doing in this galley, this melted-butter boat.  And indeed there were moments when I could see that Mr. EADIE himself shared my wonder, if I rightly interpreted certain signs of indifference and detachment in his performance.  I even suspected a sinister intention in the title, though, of course, Messrs. MORTON and NICCODEMI didn’t really get their play off in the course of a bargain sale of superannuated goods.

Apart from the Second Act, where Miss MARIE LOeHR (looking rather like a nice Dutch doll) delivered the blunt gaucheries of Remnant with a delightfully stolid naivete, the design of the play and its simple little devices might almost have been the work of amateurs.  The sordid quarrels between Tony and his preposterous mistress (whom I took to be a model, till I found that he was only an artist in steam locomotives) were extraordinarily lacking in subtlety.  In all this Bohemian business one looked in vain for a touch of the art of MURGER.  What would one not have given for something even distantly reminiscent of the Juliet scene—­“et le pigeon chantait toujours”?  And it wasn’t as if this was supposed to be a sham Americanised quartier of to-day.  We were in the true period—­under Louis PHILIPPE.  Indeed I know no other reason (costumes always excepted) why the scene was the Paris of 1840.  For the purposes of the play Tony might just as well have been a British designer of tanks (London, 1916).  Nor was there anything even conventionally French about the girl Remnant, who might have been born next-door to Bow Bells.

[Illustration:  REMNANT BARGAIN DAY.

Tony ...  MR. DENNIS EADIE.

“Remnant” ...  MISS MARIE LOeHR.]

Miss MARIE LOeHR was the life and soul of the party.  Her true comedy manner, when she was serious, was always fascinating.  She said with great discretion her little Barriesque piece about the desirability of babies, and she did all she knew to keep the sentiment from being too sickly-sweet.  Here she had strong assistance from Mr. EADIE as her lover Tony; for, though he got a fine flash out of the green eye of jealousy when he suspected his patron, Jules, of jumping his love-claim, it was obvious at the end that the success of his professional ambitions was far more to him than any affair of the heart.  And, after all, when Remnant complained of a curious bourdonnement in her ears, and Tony had to reply solemnly, “That which you hear is the beating of your heart to the music of your soul,” you could hardly expect a man with Mr. EADIE’S sense of humour to throw much conviction into the statement.