London: Jonathan Cape, 1925. Pp. 74, 115, 91, separately paginated.
The New Criterion: A Quarterly Review, 4 (Apr 1926) 395-96.
One is diffident of passing judgment upon a play which one has not seen upon the stage, but Mr. O’Neill’s plays – especially the first of these three – are so readable, and so impressive when read, that their publication in a book must be noticed. I believe that in America, where Mr. O’Neill’s plays have had a prodigious success, their author is placed with Pirandello, or even above Pirandello, as the author of a renascence of the drama. 1 This enthusiasm, for either Mr. O’Neill or Signor Pirandello, I cannot share. I know that Pirandello is a master of the technique of the theatre, as I have seen one or two of his plays; I believe O’Neill to be the same, because of the esteem which he enjoys. In reading All God’s Chillun Got Wings, we stick at the representation of the two principal actors, in successive scenes, in childhood, in adolescence, and in maturity; we wonder whether the play must not somewhat drag, from the lack of unity due to the attempt to cover such a span of time. But Mr. O’Neill has got hold of a “strong plot”; he not only understands one aspect of the “negro problem,” but he succeeds in giving this problem universality, in implying a wider application. In thisrespect, he is more successful than the author of Othello, in implying something more universal than the problem of race – in implying, in fact, the universal problem of differences which create a mixture of admiration, love, and contempt, with the consequent tension. At the same time, he has never deviated from exact portrayal of a possible negro, and the close is magnificent. The other plays show the same ability at work, but are intrinsically less interesting. 2
t. s. e.
