CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THE THEATRE
THE trouble about Mr. Priestley's new play is not that you can't see the wood for the trees, but that you can't see what the butler saw for the butlers. A brace of grand pianos, one on either side of the stage, are manned by a bickering couple who provide inci- dental music and snatches of running commentary. One remove nearer the heart of things, Mr. Roger Livesey and Miss Ursula jeans are a compere and commere who from time to time discard their neutral status, clap on wigs and intervene in the action of the central play. This is a semi-symbolised, much over-simplified study of a young couple who fall in love, get married, drift apart and are reunited. The reasons why they go through these processes, and the nature of the various mistakes they make, are stated lucidly enough; but in case we should miss any of the points, their tiffs, estrangements and reconciliations are analysed, often amusingly enough, by the various echelons of the chorus. It is a formula which gives good scope for virtuosity, but that is the most that can be said for it. Since the four commentators tell us in advance what is going to happen to the two central characters in each successive scene we cannot be gripped very hard by suspense ; and though in the course of his three acts Mr. Priestley says many true things about the relationship between the sexes, they are not more than could have been said in the course of one.
Mr. Livesey and Miss Jeans sponsor and expound the play within a play most engagingly, and it seems a pity that the various characters in which they intervene in it should b.; caricatures belonging rather to charades than to comedy.
" Paintings in Act II," announces the management at the Apollo, " are genuine Masters," but this symptom of a passionate concern for verisimilitude is no guide to the kind of entertainment which Messrs. Ian Hay and Stephen. King-Hall dispense in Off the Record. In order to acquire first-hand knowledge of conditions in the Senior Service a rising young politician persuades his friend, newly appointed to the command of a destroyer, to exchange identities with him for twenty-four hours. Up at Admiralty House the naval officer exploits to the full the prestige attaching to the First Lord's P.P.S., while down at the docks the solecisms of the Member for Wermskirk create consternation and alarm on board H.M.S. ' Mer- cury.' The imposters are simultaneously unmasked by and enamoured of a brace of lovely girls, and the prank is wound up on • predestined lines. It is all, in its simple, breezy, pillow-fight-in-the- dormitory way, great fun—the sort of play to which uncles should take their younger nieces, and nephews their older aunts. Mr. Hugh Wakefield's Admiral is an amiable time-server, Mr. Roger Maxwell gives an appropriately vinous sketch of a Tory Member for vintage Portsmouth, and Miss Pamela Matthews and Miss Eve Ashley are both very good as the lovely girls. The two impostors are played ivith immense verve by Messrs. Hubert Gregg and Bill Gates ; capital fooling, I suppose you might call it, but there is a world of differ- ence between comic acting and a display of infectious high spirits, and of this Mr. Gregg and Mr. Gazes, like many of their contem- _ poraries, seemed blissfully—at times almost too blissfully—unaware.
The raw material of Life with Father was originally life—life as lived by the late Mr. Clarence Day's family in New York 6o or 70 years ago. This raw material was refined into a series of articles in the New Yorker during the -1930's, and these, published in book form, achieved great popularity. A further process of refinement adapted these domestic tranches de vie for the American stage, where their success has been phenomenal ; and now at last—not without suffering a sea-change, since the players who interpret them are no longer Americans—Mr. Day's childhood memories have reached a London theatre.
Family life on the stage is pretty well bound to be entertaining. At the Savoy the Day family provide plenty of simple amusement, but do not entirely persuade us that they were ever meant for export. The jokes and allusions have a long way, both in space and time, to travel and they do not all travel well. Mr. Leslie Banks' explosive patriarch never quite comes to life, or at any rate to the life so vividly remembered by Mr. Day, and though Miss Sophie Stewart paints a most beguiling portrait of his consort's artless cunning the whole menage on Madison Avenue remains obstinately
semi-animate. We remember how much we liked the book, we try to remember, how many years Life with Father has been running in America ; but we see only an English cast trying, and on the whole failing, to transplant a success which seems, somehow, to
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