CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THEATRE
Affairs of State. By Louis Verneuil. (Cambridge.) THE success of this American comedy may be counted among the oddities of the theatrical year. The plot, when it reveals itself, could scarcely be less alluring : a senator, smooth of voice and ambition, is forced by an elderly ex-Secretary of State, whose young wife is in danger, into a marriage of convenience with a girl who smartly makes something more of it to the benefit of all involved. The dialogue is flat and flavourless, like high-quality magazine-fiction, and pre- sumably it reflects the conversation of American " gracious livers " with as much lumpish fidelity as the average English comedy brings to the imitation of middle-class chit-chat. is played by an English company using their own English voices. The underplaying is quite prodigious, and since the Cambridge Theatre is acoustically unsuit- able for demonstrations of modern " restraint," much of the dialogue fades away into the sort of muted babble-babble-babble that comes from the wireless when a serial is on. On the big stage the players dwindle until the whole thing is like a charade seen through the thick end of a spy-glass. Yet it is oddly attractive, and I can only put this down to the way in which the women, Miss Coral Browne and Miss Joyce Redman, play their respective parts. Their voices are pitched as low as the others, but they plainly act with an art that mercifully does not conceal art. In so doing they raise the temperature. This in turn raises the spectator's spirits, \and not before time.
LAIN HAMILTON.
Previous page
