"The Frog." Adapted by Ian Hay from the Novel by
Edgar Wallace. At the Princes Theatre Tins, I confess, is my favourite kind of play. There is nothing half-hearted about it. Mr. Wallace turns the country upside down as gleefully as Mr. Wells used to in his scientific romances. The Frog is a master criminal whose numerous myrmidons have paralysed our national life. The Government is, as ever, powerless. The innermost sanctum of Scotland Yard is little better than a death-trap, being heavily sniped in Scene 4 and blown to pieces before our eyes in Scene 8. Small wonder that the Home Secretary has phlebitis.
By the end of the thirteenth scene the issues are relatively clear. The Frog, whose identity is still unknown, loves the heroine, whose wastrel brother he has accordingly caused to be convicted of murder (under an assumed name) at Gloucester. Thanks, however, to an apparatus for recording the songs of birds which the heroine's father happened to leave at the spot where the murder was committed, the boy's innocence is established and a reprieve is granted. This does not baffle the Frog, who cuts the telegraph wires, blows up all the bridges, and jams the wireless. Gloucester is isolated, for nobody dares to fly there. So the heroine's brother is only saved from the scaffold by the executioner, who curiously enough turns out to be his father, that evasive ornithologist, and who, by severing the dreadful rope, obtains, under the official regulations, a 24-hours' reprieve for his son. 'The Frog, meanwhile, is attempting to rape the heroine in a contractor's hut in Essex, but what with her virtue and his gas-mask nothing much comes of this, and soon the rattle of musketry heralds a happy ending.
. It is, as you can see, terrific stuff (and I have left out the night club, the eccentric millionaire, and the Old Power Station near Aylesbury). Mr. Gordon Harker is superb as Detective-Sergeant Elk ; Mr. Jack Hawkins more than justifies the Old School Tie in Scotland Yard ; and almost all through the cast the acting is as good as the shooting; though,
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