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by sacrificing humanity and common-sense? the guinea pig raises a perhaps even more vital question. What is to be done with a boy who for class or other reasons finds himself in a hopeless minority at a school intended for a very different type?
The boys in both plays are direct, sincere, individual and right in their parts. No longer do academies of dramatic art teach acting instead of living in a part nor do producers order a boy to be sent them as you order a bag of potatoes. When, for example, a young understudy appears we see a different, but not necessarily a less natural, performance. It is the interesting contrast one discovers when schools of dramatic art produce plays with the lead played quite differently by a different person in each act. Never has the atmosphere of the theatre been freer, healthier or more fraught with possibilities.
It is curious that all plays with children in them were put in the shade by the dramatization of a
Victorian novel, Henry James's the turn of the screw. But he was in advance of his time. Here is the problem of the young boy probed to a painful degree. Yet it is no unusual, no magnified, no fantastic problem, it is the everyday problem of growing up. Evil influences, unwholesome atmospheres were not portrayed on the stage but hovered in the background behind the acts of the puzzled and well-meaning. There was, however, nothing mystical in the results, they were too distressingly true to life. The still quite young boy is fascinated by an unpleasant middle-aged man who never appears but whose presence in the boy's thoughts is painfully obvious. At the same time the boy is drawn, possibly from a desire to escape, to a healthy youngish woman of about thirty, almost over-anxious for his welfare. Can he confide to her the truth, the whole truth, about that sinister figure always spiritually so close to him? What young boy has not at one time or another been in that position?
THE GUINEA PIG.
Hickson as the boy
(Derek Blomfield and Joan s mother.) 1946.
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