For the most part The Devil's Disciple wears surprisingly well. the military scenes, even though played in eighteenth-century costume have a particular pungency in these times of colonial pretensions coupled with religious hypocrisy is, unhappily as necessary today as it was in 1897. His secret, like Chekhov's is to make no character unpleasant.

There is no vicious spitting-out, little bitter indignation at wrongs; his method is to make suave admissions of social shortcomings from polished, matter-of-fact mouths. He suffers pompous fools, like Major Swindon, but the actual carrier-out of the futile British war of intervention against America, General Burgoyne, is a quietly disillusioned philosopher. The effect of the unemotional detachment is doubly penetrating.

As a reaction against the melodramatic heroics of its day, The Devil's Disciple naturally strikes one less than it must have struck its Victorian contemporaries. The figure of Dick Dudgeon, a forerunner of John Tranner without his penetrating verbosity, was once intended to shock but now only mildly excites one. What a devil's disciple is, is not made exactly clear. dick so describes himself, and it is evidently meant to conjure up something dreadful to conventional minds.

but all the turns out to be is a kind of unromantic rake, with a heart and a soul well above those that one imagines prevailing in the infernal regions. Shaw here, in fact, has not yet mastered the art of creating a convincing, rounded character with a complete background. Consequently the actor playing Dick has little to go on except a general unconventionality and a pleasant rough-diamond kind of raciness.

Tyrone Power achieves all this well enough, putting his feet on the table in the will-reading scene and throughout adopting a slightly Hollywoodish romanticism, coupled with clear delivery and an avoidance of over-flamboyance. He should not have been made a "star", however, for not Shaw play is a one-man play.

There are, in fact, plenty of other characters here with enough individuality to put all dick's devil's discipleship in the shade. Noel Willman, who has produced with a realistic and skilful touch, is a brilliantly urbane General Burgoyne, delivering his dry witticisms with a convincing air of spontaneity. Lockwood West's Major Swindon is a forthrightly obtuse contrast and David Langton manages the problems of Anderson's alternations of clergyman loving husband and revolutionary soldier with a considerable amount of credibility.

Zena Walker's Judith--again a problem of real and imagined feelings--is attractively if superficially done. but perhaps the most forceful performance comes from a character that Shaw created and then had no use for--dick's naggingly righteous mother in a first act that is nearly a model of masterly irrelevance. Joan MacArthur lays this part with immense power and terrifying consistency.