ABSTRACT
Michael Langham’s production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona (31 performances) takes to itself the credit of having provided the most diverting entertainment of the season. Should one ask more of this play, or are we entitled to believe that the youthful author’s intention was to poke some good-humored fun, prettily spiced with light irony, at certain fashionable attitudes then current in life and literature, in order to divert? The play’s record for this century suggests that the theatre has regarded it as unsuitable for general enjoyment. Until the Bristol Old Vic company brought their successful 1952 production to London the score was: Old Vic-Stratford, 1916; Old Vic, 1923; Stratford, 1925 and 1938—not an encouraging total. It is not its artificiality which has in the past kept it out of the Old Vic repertory: Love’s Labour’s Lost can boast performances there in 1906, ’18, ’23, ’28, ’36, ’49 and ’54, not to mention the famous Westminster Theatre production of 1932. The trouble with The Two Gentlemen is that one of them isn’t. The average playgoer writes off Proteus as one complete cad and the end of the play as simply silly. He agrees with Launce that his master is a kind of knave, and his instinctive reaction—like Shaw’s to Imogen’s predicament—is to think Valentine a fool and say, What about Sylvia’s feelings, and Julia’s? and to push the whole thing aside with irritation: it cannot be taken seriously and it is not funny. If the actors decide to guy the conclusion and get the audience to laugh with them they will get their curtain applause, but it will not save the play, as such.
