16 
LAND 6? WATER 
September 19, 1918 
The Theatre : By W. J. Turner 
St. Martin's : The Liye Wire. Strand : The Hidden Ha?id 
ISHOUFJ) like .to meet a genuine spy. He could not 
])ossibly be as depressing as his stage brother, who 
looks like Mephistopheles in the garden scene in 
Faust, and would be arrested by the first policeman 
who saw his face. The real spy, one suspects, has 
either a frank and patriotic countenance like Mr. Bottomley 
. or a face whose stupidity is striking without being past belief. 
It is one great virtue of The Live Wire as a spy^play that 
tlie spy looks all right ; he is not incredible. You do not 
spot him the moment the curtain rises, looking a cross between 
a gorilla and a fox surrounded by nice, gullible people of 
impeccable demeanour. It is another virtue that your 
uncertainty as to who is the spy lasts until well through the 
last act. This is not done without recourse to the device 
of putting the audience on a false scent ; we are led to believe 
that the great newspaper proprietor's charming secretary, 
Christina Anderson, who turns out to be not Scotch, but 
Norwegian, is the guilty person. Theoretically this is, I 
think, a less interesting and less effective method than if 
the audience were absolutely puzzled as to who the spy was ; 
but it does not demand so much constructive skill from the 
dramatist, and in this particular instance has been tiu'ned to 
account by making Sir Hartley Merstham, the newspaper 
proprietor, deeply in love with his secretary. In the last 
act, therefore, when everything points to Christina being the 
spy and she is accused to Sir Hartley, the ordinary excite- 
ment of a ^py-hunt is considerably heightened. Christina, 
however, is not the spy, who turns out to be Sir Hartley's 
editor, Chester. It is discovered that Chester has been 
Communicating with the enemy through The Live Wire's 
patriotic editorials (a charming touch that !) by means of 
French cliches scattered through his articles — another in- 
genious touch, although French cliches are about the only 
cliches a London editor would not use. 
The Police of Convention 
Throughout the play, the police bravely uphold their 
reputation for stupidity, and seem capable of arresting any- 
body except the spy. A comic butler, named Mulligan, 
played by Mr. George Shelton, also enlivens things, so that, 
as spy-plays go. The Live Wire is quite a good entertain- 
ment, in spite of the fact that you never really believe in 
anything that is happening. Strangely enough, Christina 
seemed to be the only real person in the play, which must be 
put down to the credit of Miss Helen Morris. It so happens 
that it was the first occasion 1 had been in St. Martin's, which 
has been completed since the war, and 1 was agreeably sur- 
prised. It is by far the prettiest theatre in London ; one of 
the few, also, whose internal decoration is not a mass of 
plaster and gilt and feeble ornament. From the outside, the 
building promised to be a little better than the usual London 
theatre ; but, unfortunately, the architect could not restrain 
himself to plain Doric capitals, and spoiled the exterior with 
feeble flourishes. 
, In the meantime, the poor long-suffering dramatic critic 
turns not without an involuntary shudder to The Hidden 
Hand, advertised as the greatest of all spy-plays. It is 
certainly a marvellous product of dramatic art, and the 
astonished critic, confronted with such a masterpiece, might 
be excused if he simply murmured : "Well, well ! " incapable 
of further speech. It is really a Lyceum melodrama with 
scarcely any action. Both the hero and the villain make 
endless speeches, but neither ever does anything except to 
strike appropriate attitudes. The unfortunate actor (Mr. 
William Stack), who struggled to cope with the name of 
Captain the Rev. Christian St. George, D.S.O., C.F., could 
only be pitied, for it is more than any human being should 
be asked to bear. The Reverend Captain, who, with such 
a name, might excusably be thought*" to have come from 
some better conducted place than earth, gets into 
Strathspey Castle on the flimsiest of pretexts, and, once 
there, sticks like, a leech. The owner. Sir Charles Rosen- 
baum, Bart., M.P., a naturalised German, is in the habit of 
talking to the Kaiser every night by means of a wireless 
telegraph he keeps concealed under a^painting of King George ; 
he also receives visits from German naval commanders, who 
get off their boats and come up to his house in Scotland. 
Why they keep on coming is a mystery, since all the informa- 
tion he gives them is specially concocted by our Admiralty 
purposely to mislead them, although Rosenbaum is not 
aware of this. Unfortunately, that fool St. George, not 
knowing that the Admiralty is using Rosenbaum for its- own 
purposes, unmasks him, and the game is finished. The 
author, in his struggle to be absurd, has created for his spy 
M.P. the most amazing secretary named Fritz von Schaehau- 
sen. This fellow is preposterous as a spy ; he could never 
have put his nose outside the door without getting arrested ; 
but he supplies the only element of humour in the play, 
thanks to the acting of Mr. Michael Sherbrooke. There is 
also a moneylender named Montmorency Fortescue Curzon 
who has been drawn in an amiable light by the author, whose 
name is Laurence Cowen. It is pleasant to come across a 
departure from the conventional stage moneylender ; and if 
it be less true to life, that is a slight consideration in "the 
greatest of all spy-plays." 
The Ideal Spy 
I am tempted to reflect a little and ask myself wliat are 
the requisites 'for a really first-rate spy-play, ^^y-play 
offers such possibilities of tremendous thrills that all London 
would flock to see a really good one. The first essential is, 
I think, that the spy should be treated with respect. After 
all, the spy in real life is a man who carries his life in his 
hands ; he must have great courage, great resource, and 
may be a noble and unselfish patriot. It is a fundamental 
mistake to 'draw him as a despicable creature ; it weakens 
our interest and makes it difficult to understand how he has 
avoided capture. You cannot get good drama unless tlie 
audience sufficiently sympathise with the spy to feel a growing 
fear of his being found out. The next essential is action. 
Patriotic speeches and general heroics are out of place on the 
.stage where we want to see one man pitted against another. 
Our dramatists seem afraid of giving us a strong, sincere, 
patriotic spy working tooth and nail to make his country 
win ; they forget that the better the spy, the more exciting 
the tussle. Further,- the spy should turn the tables on his' 
pursuers at least once in the play ; nothing is more tedious 
than the luck being all tlie one way. That fine dramatic 
critic Mr. C. E. Montague, whose work used to delight all 
readers of the Manchester Guardian, once wrote an article on 
"Good and Bad Subjects for Plays." He pointed out, first 
of all, that what might be a bad subject one year would be 
a good one another owing to political or social changes. 
Such goodness or badness was merely relative ; as a case of 
absolute badness, he suggested : 
The platonic loves of two deaf mutes. 
And plots which consist in flights and pursuits. 
Flights and pursuits which often form the most exciting 
chapters of novels — who does not remember the wonderful 
examples in The Cloister and the Hearth, never surpassed 
by any novelist before or since ? — are ridiculous on the stage, 
when pursuer and pursued flash panting before one's eyes for 
a second ^nd then disappiear, to be heard walking round the 
scenery at the back of the stage, to re-appear on the other 
side, puffing and blowing as if they had run miles. This 
particular disability of the stage cuts out what might make a 
sensational scene in a spy play ; but it is of very little moment 
when one considers the dramatic richness of the .spy theme 
as a whole. It is said that the life's blood of drama is action, 
and if we substitute "conflict " iov "action," this is absolutely 
true. Now, "conflict" is, of necessity, the very essence of 
a spy-play, whether the conflict takes the form of fisticuffs 
or intrigues. It would be possible to write a spy-play in 
which no blow was ever struck, that nevertheless was nothing 
but one tremendous fight, one man's brain being pitted 
against another's. But it must be a real fight, with heart 
in it : not a sham one, with all the sense on one side. I can 
imagine a spy-play founded on the present state of war 
between ourselves and Germany that for intellectual interest 
could stand beside the finest conceptions of Ibsen. It would 
have an enormous success among people "fed up" with 
clap-trap like The Hidden Hand and with nerve-shattering 
racket like By Pigeon Post. But will anybody ever write 
it ? that is the question. Well, on this subject I am an 
optimist. Better plays will be written than ever have 
been written, and although there will be more bad 
plays, they will not prosper so easily as they do now, 
when < everybody 'is in such a state of excitement and 
mental strain that half the audience in the theatres is there 
out of sheer restlessness. 
