Romance versus Realism Of Success Story, which last week enthroned
Miss Gentude Lawrence, I suppose it is fair to say that the title was a warning to expect romance rather than realism. The theatrical excerpts, undoubtedly, will have had great charm for old buffers like myself— early songs by Miss Lawrence in the manner of a thoroughly worldly thrush, and the celebrated duologue with Mr. Noel Coward (Private Lives, Act I), and even the tea-table-and-afternoon-call-scene from Pygmalion ; though here are a character and scene which it is hard to claim that Miss Lawrence has made peculiarly and individually her own. However, there were these snatches of past pleasures, with the closing minutes of La Voi.x Humaine to give them weight ;. and great fun they weic.
Churl that I am, I could very easily (and in spite of the title) have done with something, sometimes, somewhere in the programme a little deeper, and even a little dingier. The whole affair was in the glossy magazine style, with its "triumphant first nights" and its raptly reverential use of phrases like "this very great actress "—a description one might possibly apply to one player in a generation, after a few months' fasting and self-purification and prayer. One got no nearer to Miss Lawrence than, say, the first row of the stalls ; and, as she is clearly a person of the most ravishing characteristics, is this not a pity ?
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