CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THEATRE
/6 The Love of Four Colonels." By Peter Ustinov. (Wyndham's.) THERE are at least four Mr. Ustinovs, too. The dramatist, the philosopher and the undergraduate all take a hand in the game, while every now and then the poet, like a small boy invigilating on the boundary, takes—touchingly rather than expertly—his chance of returning the ball into play. In this admirable entertainment it is the dramatist who matters most ; Mr. Ustinov has written an original, witty and delightful play.
The quadrumvirate of colonels—British, American, French and Russian—represent the occupying Powers in a district of (as it might be) Austria. They are already planning, with the weary acrimony which pervades all their deliberations, to move their headquarters to a near-by castle when the Wicked Fairy enters in the guise of a sleazy and equivocal conjurer. In the castle, it appears, the Sleeping Beauty is still dormant, and the whole party removes there, accom- panied by the Good Fairy, embodied for the occasion in the person of an A.T.S. driver called Donovan. At this point the play turns into a kind of charade. Each of the Colonels enacts with the awakened Princess the fulfilment of his innermost romantic long- ings, the Wicked Fairy abetting him but the Good Fairy intervening to make sure that nothing comes of it all in the end. From this we pass to what is in effect a music-hall sketch in which the wives of the four Colonels exhibit in an entertaining way their national characteristics ; and the whole thing ends in a symbolic denoue- ment whose • obscurity suggests that Mr. Ustinov (and who shall blame him ?) has at last got out of his depth and cannot be bothered to tow the play back to the terra firma of the shallows.
This is not, as you can see, a piece whose merits chiefly reside in the logic or the symmetry of its construction. It is really a sort of glorified conceit, made even more characteristic of its author by the fact that he plays, with great gusto and considerable subtlety, the part of the Wicked Fairy. The first act is the best, with its brilliant satire in quadripartite bickerings and its pleasantly nonsensical excursions into magic. The successive transfigurations of the four Colonels are not really much more than excuses for Mr. Ustinov (the undergraduate one) to deploy his talents as a parodist, but the
parody—particularly of a Shakespearian fool and of a Tchekhcre production—is of a very high order ; though it may not increase the play's stature, qua play, it does not diminish its value as enter- tainment.
Mr. John Fernald's production is extremely good, and so is the acting. Miss Moira Lister, besides looking very pretty, gives four clever performances as the awakened Princess, Miss Gwen Cherrell makes an admirable Good Fairy, and Mr. Colin Gordon, as the Bramble-like British colonel, is responsible, in a dry, quiet, casual way, for as sound a bit of acting as you will find anywhere in
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