STAGE AND SCREEN
The Theatre "Young England." By Walter Reynolds. At the Kingsway Theatre Mn. REYNOLDS is the unhappy sport of fate. The " gods " of his pleasant vices make instruments to plague him. He wrote Young England as a deeply serious play, a play with a purpose. " I have tried," he writes in the programme, " to re-introduce to the living stage some of its long-lost virility and its old-time attraction—to restore its vitals to the Theatre—to provide three full hours of movement and action with clearly-to-be-heard words in place of the inaudi- bilities of our latter-day theatres." A worthy theme. Nor is his second motif any less admirable. " In addition," he continues, later in the same note, " I have most respectfully woven into my play, as an extra pleasurable feature, some threads of the material of one of the most beneficent move- ments in the history of mankind, viz., the creation of the picturesque and practical Boy Scouts and Girl Guides move- ment by the indomitable defender of Mafeking." (The italics are in their entirety the author's.) Between the conception and the creation, as Mr. T. S. Eliot has said, falls the shadow. In this case the shadow seems to have been that of Robin Goodfellow, who, bewitching our author's inkpot, has turned his messages of good will into protestations as richly and unconsciously comical as Bottom's wooing. Let us not mince matters : Young England is the funniest entertainment now showing in London.
The first act takes place in Wartime, " east of Aldgate pump." Here there is such a riot of local colour that one has some difficulty in picking out the true blue of the dis- tressed maiden and the white feather of Jabez Hawk, the villain. Jabez deserts the girl, who dies in a convenient Salvation Army shelter, giving birth to a son. A young War-widow takes pity on the infant, adopts. him and gives him the simple but telling name of Hope Ravenscroft.
A quarter of a century later we find Hawk, wickeder than ever, installed as Mayor of Carlingford, while Ravenscroft is the best Scoutmaster in England. But it would be unfair to disclose the rich and various stratagems, excursions and scouting activities which divert us until villainy is unmasked and young love left triumphant. The machinery here is not your common-or-garden makeshift kind : it is cumbersome in a magnificent, larger-than-lifesize fashion. The younger Hawk's burglary, for instance, is discovered by means of an automatic film-camera working in the dark (" The eye of Heaven working through an infra-red ray "). Hope's betrothal to Lady Mary is a moving scene. " I must be the happiest Scout in England," he cries ; " And I," echoes his beloved, " must be the happiest Guide." The curtain falls on the baronial hall, whose back wall has miraculously changed into Loch Lomond in springtime. Britannia, flanked by Brownies, Wolf Cubs, Scouts, Guides, and the complete company, stands superb against an erratically lowered Union Jack. In grand unison—" Land of Hope and Glory."
All of which may sound entertaining enough on its own account. But what raises it above any other such piece which we have seen recently is the attitude and the co-opera- tion of the audience. Led by a number of fanatics who have visited the play some twenty or thirty times, the whole body of the house joins continually in the play's dialogue with quips, running commentary, advice to the characters. Some of the vocal annotations have become traditional and are repeated at every performance. There is nothing of rowdiness or hooliganism in their attitude. All seem to realize that this unofficial accompaniment is the making of the entertainment. The actors themselves accept it, and it disturbs them not at all. If this behaviour appears to the reader to be both bewildering and in bad taste, one can only urge an immediate visit to the theatre. The great cyclone of laughter should captivate anybody. As a remedy for the author's chagrin, one may suggest that to make a theatreful of people lose themselves in laughter during more than a hundred performances may be even more beneficent than the same amount of Boy Scout propaganda.
RUPERT HART-DAVIS.
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