Mr. John Drinkwater is a playwright of extraordinary versatility. In
stately historical pageant he can move with assured dramatic tread, and now in a little three-act play entitled Bird in Hand (Sidgwick and Jackson, 3s. 6d.), which was a week or two back produced at the. Birmingham Reper- tory Theatre, he depicts in a modern setting the everlasting struggle of age and youth, of authority versus freedom of action, of one who prizes gradations in the social scale and of those who tend to believe that we are all levelling up or down. An element of good-humoured farce runs through the story of how the yeoman pride of old Thomas Greenleaf, landlord of' The Bird in Hand,' is finally brought to consent to his daughter's marriage with the son of the local squire. If any message (horrid word) is sought in the play, perhaps it lies in the words "To some of us life is a spectacle, to others an argument."
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