[MacCarthy was an English essayist and critic. In the following review, he favorably assesses Dinner at Eight, noting its fast pace and well-drawn characters.]

Dinner at Eight, at the Palace Theatre, by George Kaufman and Edna Ferber, both gifted authors (her novel, Show Boat was very superior to the popular play made from it), is an exceptionally animated performance: violent, unintermitted animation—that is the outcome and the aim of this ingenious mixture of ingredients, each of which is pungent enough to flavour for some palates the whole play. I can well imagine one playgoer declaring afterwards that Dinner at Eight is excruciatingly funny, and another, that it is excruciatingly painful. The fact is Dinner at Eight is both; it is extremely amusing and thoroughly remorseless; which of these aspects will predominate in your own retrospect depends upon whether you happen to be tender or tough; but while you are in the theatre, in either case, you will be swept along by its vivacious velocity.

One important point at which the transatlantic stage differs from ours is tempo: their pace is double ours. (Of course, I am only speaking of the tip-top American play of the moment, not of such deep plays as Eugene O'Neil's Strange Interlude.) Recall the rattle and flash with which Broadway, for example, dashed to its terminus. Now, an English audience was once content to ruminate receptively while the playwright was preparing his situations. It used to be for connoisseurs even an added pleasure to be able to observe him at it, digging with deliberation the dry trench down which the water was eventually to flow. In the well-made three-act drama the whole of the first act, and often the greater part of the second, was devoted to this steady trenching. But the modern, and especially the American-modern, temperament hates preparation and adores—surprise. Of course, there must be some preparation, or incidents won't hold together and crescendo would be impossible, but what is absolutely necessary must now be conveyed by hints and flashes; by a casual word dropped in the midst of chatter, by a gesture while the spectator's eye is on something else. No more preparation is allowed; it would be boring. The quality of attention demanded of the modern audience is therefore that which enables the driver of a racing car while swerving past a van to catch the name on a signpost as it whisks behind him. When I compare these methods with old leisurely ways of telling a story on the stage, I am reminded of that pathetic figure, the Baker, in The Hunting of the Snark who, by the by, had some vital information to impart. He began, you remember:

"My father and mother were honest, though poor—"

"Skip all that," cried the Bellman in haste,

"If it once becomes dark, there's no chance of a Snark—

We have hardly a minute to waste."

Then, he tried again:

"A dear uncle of mine (after whom I was named)

Remarked when I bade him farewell—"

"Oh skip your dear uncle," the Bellman exclaimed,

As he angrily tinkled his bell.

At a tip-top American play I hear perpetually the furious tinkle of that bell. Though bewildered, for I have myself a ruminating mind, I find I am often exhilarated by this speeding-up. It certainly makes me impatient afterwards of being compelled to stare at the slow evolution on the stage of a situation all-too-clear and perhaps not important. And I am sure the movie habit has quickened considerably the rapidity of the public's capacity for attention, though we orientals must still strike western playwrights and producers as very slow in the up-take. But our own are hurrying; Mr. Noel Coward was pretty brisk in his methods in Private Lives—and we liked them. A London audience to-day will not find Dinner at Eight too fast to follow, while it is so strewn with points that if, as I did, they only take one out of five, they will find nevertheless they have a mindful.

One of the tests I apply to plays, before recommending or cursing them, is the degree to which I have lost self-consciousness myself in the theatre. If I have been so riveted that I ceased to know that I was a human-being sitting between others, then, whatever on reflection I may think of its value, that performance goes straight into my category of good entertainments. The play and actors have passed the great, elementary, fundamental test. At the Palace Theatre from the rise to the fall of each curtain, and even during the short "blacking-out" intervals between the four scenes of which each act is composed, the performers succeeded in turning me into a mere characterless percipient attentive only to them. But, and this also is criticism of the play, I did not spend the act-intervals (though I was eager enough to get back to my seat to see what was coming) in that delicious state of gently-heaving emotion and astonished clarity of mind that fine drama produces. I did not wander about the lobby hoping to Heaven no one would speak to me; on the contrary, click, I was back again in myself, ready to talk about anything and wondering, not about the play, but if I was thirsty enough to enjoy a glass of beer and when I could get my hair cut. Well, if the reader thinks me a reliable thermometer, after those two statements he ought to know for himself where to place, roughly, Dinner at Eight as a play and, for certain, that it was exceedingly well acted. "But what was it like? Shall I enjoy it?" These, too, are questions, whatever reader asks them, it is my business to try to answer.

Well, it was like Peter Arno's Parade come to life, with an undertow of tragedy pulling through it. Does the New Yorker amuse you? Do you enjoy the bite of its humour, its gay toughness, its amoral moral and anti-social social satire? If you enjoyed, say, the humour of the picture of a big "butter-and-egg man" putting a detaining paw over the too-often filled champagne glass of a little "chippy" and murmuring with a leer of portentous tenderness, "Darling, don't spoil my dream"; if you have chuckled over those drawings of spoilt women and pompous men in preposterously luxurious surroundings losing all corresponding tenu, and collapsing into a native, yet not always unamiable, indignity; if you have relished those grotesque pictorial contrasts between pretences and realities ("Get up, you mutt, we're to be married to-day"); if you have appreciated the economy with which a laconic legend will explode the whole satire of the picture (I wish to suggest a parallel here between the snap of the dialogue and the mordant humour of the situations in Dinner at Eight); if you have recognised in modern American satire of Americans—yes, through the very heyday of "bunk" and "ballyhoo" and of a snatch-as-snatch-can society—the survival of a civilised, intellectual standard as cruel and incorruptible as that of Forain and Lautrec in Paris of the 'eighties—then, you will thoroughly enjoy this play. You will appreciate, then, the acrid pathos of the male movie-beauty (all profile, no talent) whose day is over but with the help of gin pretends it is not (Mr. Basil Sydney's performance was perfect), who, on the very night he is invited as a lion to the dinner party, turns on the suicide's gas in his gorgeous apartments for which he can never pay. You will relish the Billingsgate back-chat spurting from the mouth of "a dainty rogue in porcelain," and staggering, like the jet from a hose, the raging impetuosity of her millionaire husband. (One claps Mr. and Mrs. Packard wildly in their tremendous matrimonial row while dressing for the party.) You will not miss the subtlety of the refined doctor's infatuation (he also is invited) with the aforesaid pink and silvery little slut, or the tableau she hastily prepares for him in bed with a serious book upon her knees: "not that, the big one, you nit-wit," she yells at her maid. (Kitty Packard, ex-cloak-room attendant, is an "introvert," her husband an "extrovert"; she has got hold of those tags from her lover, and on her pearly, peevish lips they suggest the whole of the doctor's amorous technique and his own self-deception.) And the hostess! The agitated social climber, Mrs. Jordan, who has no need to climb, but must be in it, in it, in it; and to whom social occasions are so pre-eminently important, that when the pivots of her party an English Lord and Lady chuck at the last moment, she astounds us—we who know that one guest has suffocated himself, that her husband has been ruined by Packard and has angina pectoris, that her maid has been seduced by her butler, that her engaged daughter is in love with the movie-star, that the Packard menage is in dissolution, that the doctor's wife is miserable and the doctor ashamed of himself—with an hysterical outburst, in the vein of, "Was ever trouble like to mine!" Miss Irene Vanbrugh's deftness, alacrity and crescendo in this part are a treat to watch. Is there a point of rest for the imagination in this rattling satire? Yes—a small one—her husband, the old-fashioned American man of business, played with dignity by Mr. Tristan Rawson.