A WAR COMEDY REVIVED [. BILLETED," BY F. TENNYSON JESSE
AND H. M. HARWOOD. -ROyALTY THEATRE.] WitEN did the Modern Girl, or the Modern Woman, first appear upon the stage ? They tell us that she was a creation of the War, which removed parental or marital control ; put many women into breeches ; and so fashioned a slapdash soul, in conformity with a mannish costume.
It may have been so ; but I began to doubt it as I listened to Mrs. Taradine (Miss Athene Seyler) and Miss Penelope Moon (Miss Jane Welsh) in Billeted the other night. It is the year 1915. Miss Moon, indeed, appears in breeches. But her Conversation shows that she is still sweetly and Utterly the prey of a dozen pre-War delusions'. She idealizes men—even men of fifty, even a " dug-out " Colonel of the obviously incompetent type. She thinks them all " wonderful " and mysterious. If her legs look warlike, her brains plainly belong to some far-off age of half-forgotten peace. "Isn't money horrible ? " she inno- cently questions, when she finds that her dear Betty Taradine hasn't enough to pay the telephone account. And Betty cannot pay it because she is the helpless sort of woman who, when one of her cheques is returned to her, With "Refer to drawer" across it, runs to the desk and wonders which drawer a nice kind bank-manager means. All very amusing, in its light way, but evidently the authors will have it that, as yet—in 1915—the Modern Girl had not arisen. She was, at that stage, the womanly woman still.
I did not see Miss Iris Hoey as Mrs. Taradine in the original production ; but it is hard to believe that the part could have ever been better played than by Miss Seyler, one of the first of our artificial comedy • actresses. Is she, at times; a little too artificial, with her animated gestures, her high-heeled advances upon her "interlocutor," as the novelists say ? Has the playing of many similar parts ever so slightly stereotyped her style ? One asks, only in order to suggest a hope that Miss Seyler may soon get an opporr tunity of proving again what she can do with the comic spirit in a play of real substance ; or else in one of delicately polished language. In a Repertory Theatre she would be at the service of Congreve. As to Mr. Dennis Eadie, the husband, " billeted " on his unpractical wife, he seems, in this play, to be the true successor of Hawtrey, or of Wyndham, as the incarnation of comfortable wit.
R. J.
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