, c The Schoolmistress." By Sir Arthur W. Pinero. (Saville.) WHAT
a workmanlike farce this is ! The contemporary craftsman in this genre too often rides his jokes into the ground ; one funny situation lasts him so long that its humours have become stale and mechanical before he moves on to the next. Pinero (though any- one who chooses a girls' school as his setting cannot altogether avoid repeating some of his basic gambits) understood that on the stage, if not on the battlefield, exploitation is more important than consolidation. The idea of a headmistress who is secretly married is a good one ; it is improved when one of her pupils is in the same position. The admiral drinking midnight champagne in a seminary for young ladies without realising that it is one is an acceptable figure of farce, who becomes something more than that by virtue of his failure, after a long absence at sea, to recognise one of the young ladies as his daughter.
Mr. Fred Emney is this admiral, and he is very funny indeed. So are Miss Madge Elliott, as the schoolmistress who is making (if you follow me) clandestine public appearances in comic opera, and Mr. Cyril Ritchard as the drone to whom she is married. The production goes, perhaps, farther into burlesque than it need have, but the result is agreeable entertainment. PETER FLEMING.
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