I
cannot think that I would have gone out and paid to
see William Douglas Home's play, The Kingfisher,
however glittering the stars who played it. In fact, I
think if I had gone I would very likely have ended up
feeling such doubts quite justified. It is a play not
without some depth of feeling, but Mr Douglas Home
having chosen to leave most of it beneath his
characters' softly talcumed surface, the interpreters
can do little more than glow discreetly by way of
indicating inner turmoil.
It is, of course, a comedy, more concerned to
observe the foolishness of human vanities than to
probe the pain they provoke. The central characters
are a successful even knighted novelist, who has never
married, and the woman he failed to convince half a
century earlier but is now set free by her husband’s
demise on the golf course, not to mention the size of
his will. She comes for tea after the funeral, stays
for a drunken dinner, accepts him, spends what turns
out to have been a chaster night than she might have
fancied, dithers a little in the morning, but departs,
leaving him to his anxious valet - the most
appropriate sort of marriage, it seems, after all. It
is a question of people actually caring for each
other.
The point of The
Kingfisher, in the play, as I take it, lies
in a reference to his method of choosing a nesting
site by flying headlong into the bank from across the
stream, and if the terrain proves too hard for his
beak, moving straight on somewhere else. Thus, Sir
Cecil's way of love.