STAGE AND SCREEN The Theatre
SYBARITES will not, if they are wise, attend the Unity Theatre Club. Its productions take place in a gloomy alley off King's
Cross ; the seats are of plain, unpadded wood, the leg-room between them is adequate only for a dwarf, no discernible provision has been made for heating. But the programme is much more cheering than the theatre. The object of this group is the praiseworthy one of producing plays which, unlike all but a fragmentary minority of those in which the
ordinary commercial theatre trafficks, are relevant to the social problems of the day. At the moment they are staging two plays which deal with strikes, each of them excellently acted and produced. Private Hicks depicts a scene in a town in the Middle West when troops are brought out to break a strike. When the order to fire is given, one of them, Private Hicks, throws down his rifle and calls on his companions to do like- wise. He is put under arrest to await court-martial. But his commanding officer realises that if the incident gains publicity his own powers of discipline will be questioned : he therefore offers to overlook the matter if Hicks will declare before his assembled platoon that he acted through nervousness and not out of conviction, and that in future he will not disobey an order to fire. The proposal is speciously made and Hicks is on the point of accepting. But at the last moment his princi- ples reassert themselves, and the play, which up to. this point has made all its points firmly and without hysteria, ends on an embarrassing note of evangelism.
• Waiting for Lefty opens with a scene of a strike-meeting of a taxi-drivers' union ; five scenes follow, showing the decisive moment in the lives of five committee men which has in the long run brought them to the platform. There is nothing par- ticularly original in the structure of the play, but it has a spontaneity, a vividness, and an ability to convey the realities of persistent economic pressure by suddenly and effectively changing from a tragic to a comic mood which reminds one of
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