"Black Chiffon." By Lesley Storm. (Westminster.)
To shoot a rhinoceros dead is easier than to photograph it well. In this play, a very good one, Miss Storm evokes a monster of which our knowledge is—as indeed it once was of rhinoceroses—speculative and imprecise. She returns from jungles mapped only by the bold triangulations of the psychologists with a fascinating batch of nega- tives. As the pages of her album turn we are gripped and intrigued ; but at the end we should be hard put to it to describe very accurately the quarry she was after. Dappled with light and shade, blurred now by under- and now by over-exposure, the monster chides us ; perhaps we miss a little the great, ugly, stuffed head over the fireplace with which the Greek dramatists sometimes returned from similar safaris.
But this is to do less than justice to a highly intelligent play which deals primarily with the intense love of a mother for her son. This leads her to commit, somewhere in the No Man's Land between the conscious and the sub-conscious, a, crime which is not against nature but is, emphatically, against the law. On the eve of her son's wedding Mrs. Christie steals a black chiffon nightdress from a shop, is caught, and-faces a charge of theft. The deep and intricate causes which impelled her are diagnosed by a psychiatrist. If his diagnosis is used in her defence, her innocent but warped emotional relationships with her son and her husband will of necessity be exposed to the public view ; if it is not used, she will assuredly go to prison. This dilemma and its implications are developed by the dramatist with great skill and in the end resolved with honesty and realism.
In the principal part Miss Flora Robson gives a performance which is none the less powerful for being subtle and restrained. Mr. Wyndham Goldie, as her quietly and unconsciously odious husband, acts with a beautiful precision, Mr. Anthony Ireland's psychiatrist unravels with spruce dexterity the congplexes of his patient, and Miss Rachel Gurney, in a pail of no particular interest, reveals unobtru-
sively a marked and interesting talent. PETER PLEASING.
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