" Right . Side Up." By C. E. Webber. (Arts.) .
THIS new comedy is a protest in the form .of a parable. Mr. Webber imagines a whimsical, tree-dwelling boy-saint who falls among spivs and is threatened by them. From sleeping-with their moll, he acquires enough secular cunning to outwit them at their own reck- less game. Mr. Webber's intention in this is to show how barbed and telling a platitude can be. He is suggesting that the frank stare of a child, which rejects everything except empirical evidence, is something our civilisation cannot abide. He is also regretting the loss of innocence which immediately succeeds any compromise with conformity—especially the compromise called growing-up.
The framework is promising, the construction smooth, but the play is a total failure. To begin with, it his been given a sadly unbalanced performance ; but the real fault is Mr. Webber's dialogue. He seems quite out of touch with our wicked ways ; not only has he no ear for contemporary idiom, he has not even. paid attention to the cinema, which spawns it. Phrases like " I'm a monkey's uncle," " Skip it, sister " and " With knobs on " were old- fashioned long before the word " spiv " was coined ; what may have been conceived as stylisation emerges as banality.
There is, I am afraid, embarrassment on both sides of the foot- lights, even among the better actors. Mr. Harold Lang, for instance, playing a cosh-boy called Cyril, takes refuge in shrugging like a yoked ox, projecting his chin, baring his teeth and shuttling his accent from. Yorkshire to Milwaukee ; and communicates little except his own anxiety to cover up what has been written for him. Mr. Geoffrey Hibberd, cramped by the simple fact of being much too old for the part, turns the Boy into a sort of little minister. Mr. Roy Rich's direction is all that we have come to expect from—well,
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