CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THEATRE
"To Dorothy, a Son." By Roger MacDougall. (Savoy.) TONY Riot is a struggling young English composer living pre- cariously in a cottage near Dorking. His wife is having a baby in one of those mezzanine bedrooms (by-passed in this case by a stairway leading to the upper storeys of the edifice) which have long been—at any rate upon the stage—a distinctive and valuable idio- syncrasy of rural architecture in the Home Counties. But in Tony, as no doubt in many another denizen of the Dorking hinterland, the nomadic impulse once burnt strongly ; young though he is, he got married in Tonga and divorced in Bolivia, which is more than most of us have done, even at our age. As a matter of fact it turns out, in both cases, to be more than he has done himself. In Bolivia he understood imperfectly the language in which the court conducted its proceedings, and a letter from. the Spanish Embassy in Boston (whose location one takes to represent one of General Franco's more sophisticated protests against non-recogni- tion) informs him that it was two of the witnesses whose union was on that occasion arbitrarily sundered. At a later stage even more complex legalities are proved to have invalidated the original marriage in Tonga.
This is just as well ; for the expectant and rather exigent mother is—or, rather, had hitherto been thought to be—the second Mrs. Rigi. The first, a Macchiavellian poppet from America, is present at the accouchement because her uncle's large fortune will be hers unless a son is born to her former husband within a year of the uncle's death. It goes without saying that we are already well on into D-1 day and indeed H-hour comes and goes without any addition to the Rigi family having taken place. Then someone remembers that H-hour in England is H minus 5 in America (where the uncle died): so there is still time for whatever corresponds in obstetrical circles to a photo-finish.
This could be, but is not, a tasteless and embarrassing farce. Its humour is not very subtle, but Mr. MacDougall has an eye for pleasantly extravagant situations and the whole thing rattles along in an agreeable manner and at a suitably high speed. Miss Yolande Donlan, as an outwardly feather-pated fortune-hunter, gives a performance of immense wit, charm and gaiety ; Mr. Richard Attenborough is very good on rather more obvious lines ; and Miss Sheila Sim, though invisible to the audience, builds up for them a wonderfully coherent picture of a lady in an unusually delicate
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