ABSTRACT
There is at the Duke of York’s Theatre an ingenious entertainment called The Yellow Jacket, which purports to be a Chinese play in the Chinese manner. Whether it is really Chinese or not does not matter. It is sufficiently like The Mikado and Willow-pattern and unlike The Letters of John Chinaman to be accepted by an English audience. What is important is that it is an entertainment which does perfectly set up its conventions for the evening’s purposes. It has no change of scene. The author of the piece and proprietor of the troupe of actors announces the shifting of the scene—“ *Tis a room in the palace of Wu Sin ”— “ ’Tis a love-nest,” etc.—and, because he believes in the transformation, his words carry conviction. All the machinery of the stage is exposed. There is absolutely no deception, as the conjurer says, and the audience is trusted to deceive itself, and it does so. Unfortunately for it-self this deception does not lead to anything, because the American authors have, like so many of their English colleagues, been concerned more with stage trickery than with any dramatic idea. They have trusted too much to the novelty and the humours of Chinese convention and have failed to see to it that the play itself, which moves through that convention, should be imaginative and charming. In fine, this Chinese play is infected with the vices of the Western theatre to such an extent that its own virtues do not appear and the entertainment does not invariably entertain : indeed, without Mr. Frederick Ross as the Chorus and Mr. Holman Clark as the Property Man there would be very little fun at that theatre. The actors, as is so often the case, are left to make the best of a poor business and so it is not from China that we are to look for help, though the magnates of the theatre will no doubt ransack the Far East and the Further West before they begin to look at home for dramatic fare to lay before the English public.
