At the Lyceum, Mrs. Keeley has been adding another to
the long list of her male characters. In Friends at Court—a two-act trifle of French in- trigue, by an English dramatist, Mr. Taylor—she plays a young Gascon fire-eater, who-carries off a beauty from two such powerful rivals as Louis the Fourteenth and the Duke de Lauznn, and manages to preserve the virtue of his wife and the royal favour too. Mrs. Keeley assumes the swaggering air and go-a-head rapidity of speech and action of the boy- braggart, with vivacious energy and droll effect; and if thetion is farcical, it is amusing, aid initeeplini with the charatte# of.
The last new farce at the Haymarket, The King and I, tilt hew]. origin; and, being cleverly constructed, tbere is a consistency in its extra- vagance that heightens the ludicrous effect of the equivoqne. Buckstone is the hero; and enormously droll he is—wallowing in the mire of servility and abject loyalty before a king of his own creation, the coinage of his money-clinking brain. Buckstone's king-worship beats Chinese adulation hollow: the Chinese endow their sovereign with celestial glories, and bow down their heinl before him; but Buckstone in the farce first brings down his king to the level of his own baseness, and then prostrates himself body and soul before the idol—which turili out a cheat after all. It 's a rich bit of satire, and glorious fun.
Previous page
