THE THEATRE,
"THE RAT" AT - THE PRINCE OF WALES'S.
IT is a dreary thought that wickedness should be as hard to maintain as goodness. I hate to think that the enter-
prising burglar or the cut-throat momentarily unoccupied in crime _should so often be caught listening to the gurgling of little brooks or the jollities of the village chime. But Mr. David L'Estrange is not less clear than was W. S. Gilbert that it is for that gurgle that you will ultimately exchange the green gurgle of absinthe through a straw, and that almost everywhere the chinies at midday quite outsound those at midnight. So certain is Mr.
L'Estrange of this that he really gave us very little of the
Rat's wicked past. A mild scene in a café, where Miss Dorothy St. John as a dancer allowed herself to be very gently pushed to her knees, was quite outweighed by long accounts of happy days in the country which the Rat had spent with his adopted
sister, and where, we are repeatedly reminded, he was careful net to tread on the bluebells. There can be little doubt that that is what an apache would be like in real life, but need we have him like that on the stage, or at least need we have him like that except in serious plays ?
Apart, however, from the mildness of the haunts, both of gilded and of grimy vice, The Rat provides an excellent
evening's entertainment, by reason of some extremely good acting by Miss Isabel Jeans and by Miss Dorothy Batley, anda certain modernity and distinction about Mr. Hugh Gee's scenery. Miss Isabel Jeans is nothing short of exquisite as the pampered villainess.. She attempts to seduce the Rat from his career of picking pockets in sewers and thieves' kitchens (manly crime) to join her in a career of exploiting cocottes and financiers (lap-dog crime). In this scene she gets her
seduction completely across the footlights. The part is not by any means worthy of an actress who played Lady
Flutter so exquisitely, yet conventional as it is it does give her considerable opportunities of showing her increasing powers.
Hardly less remarkable is Miss Dorothy Batley's perfor- mance -as pale °dile. There are- moments when she gets a real emotion and real beauty into this unambitious theatrical hotch-potch of a play. She plays the part of the apache's adopted sister, who is really in love with him, and is throughout quiet, restful and restrained. She makes a speciality of slow, lagging entrances, and in one where Mr. Hugh Gee has given her -a remarkably -simple black background representing the corridor of a Court of Justice, she produces an extraordinary effect. Indeed, at every tragic moment in which her lines were colourless rather than actively absurd, Miss Batley produced a feeling of reality and emotion quite foreign to the piece.
Mr. Ivor Novell°, like so many English stars, is an actor whose stage personality is attractive to you or unattractive. It is not immediately clear to me why that personality should here have tended to make the Rat seem a rather harmless creature— not quite a guinea pig, you understand, but say something more like the virtuous mongoose, True, he sat on tables in sinister coils, he threw knives, he behaved with mingled amorousness and brutality to every woman he saw, and a frayed cigarette hung from his underlip. His trousers were wide at the top and narrow, at the bottom, he wore a velvet jacket, he was sinuous ; but somehow, what with bluebells and little sisters, he remained to the end of the piece the mongoose, friend of man.
But, for Miss Batley's and, Miss Jean's performances one would have said thatthis was the author's fault. Incidentally, how..much good Grand- Guignol has done to our presentation of French life. Miss Hannah Jones, for instance, was excellent in he Grand Guignol tradition of fatly squalid old ladies.
Tenn..
Tim Three Hundred Club announce that their performance of 'Mr. Richard Hughes's play.-A Comedy of Good and Evil, is Postponed till July 0b.
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