2 AUGUST 1946, Page 11

THEATRE

" Marriage a La Mode." By John Dryden. At the St. James's.

HATS off to Sicily, it seems to me, is really the moral of this polished and successful revival. For it is in Sicily that Doralice and Rhodophil, Palamede and Melantha thread—not. unduly distracted by the vagaries of Polydamus, Hermogenes and Eubulus—the laby- rinth of their intrigues. There used to be a song in which these lines occurred : " When it's night-time in Sicily It's Wednesday over here," and certainly the brittle, mannered and immoral elegances of Dryden's comedy are set off to better advantage by Sicilian moonlight than they would have been by the more mundane effulgence of an English weekday. The whole play gains immensely from the classical stilts upon which it moves, from the fact that what Lamb called " the Utopia of gallantry " is removed, by a flimsy but polite convention, from the Court of King Charles to a setting of even greater artificiality. Nobody of course is deceived, none of the satirist's shafts goes astray or is blunted ; but Dryden's cheerfully malicious picture of Restoration society acquires from its tinsel frame a certain perspective and urbanity. The comedy of manners is still being written. Will any of its contempqrary products bear revival in two or three hundred years' time? Probably not ; for the artificial conventions which, for all their seeming lifelessness, keep stuff of this kind ever-green have long gone out of use. Perhaps the main reason why Wilde still lives today is that his characters kept at a safe distance from real life. Mr. Bonamy Dobree has said, of certain scenes in Marriage a la Mode, tliat to read them is to laugh aloud, to see them acted is to make the sides ache." I doubt if many people will be tickled quite as violently as this by the production at the St. James's, but it is certainly extremely amusing and well worth going to see. The sub-plot ought by rights to be a bore, for it is a tangle of foster- fathers, favourites and usurpers' long-lost children ; but even its admittedly rather tiresome complexities are illumined by the beauty and precision of the language in which they are stated, and Miss Moira Lister and Mr. David Peel act well enough to compel our interest in the tortuous path of their true love. But the play's main business is with the amorous intrigues of the four principal characters and here, though the joke is always the same joke, Dryden's wit flags very seldom. Mr. John Clements (who also directed the play) makes Palamede an admirable purveyor of repartee and innuendo, and Mr. Robert Eddison's Rhodophil is a good foil to him. Miss Frances Rowe is an accomplished Doralice, but Miss Kay Hammond does not do much with the female fop Melantha. The use or misuse of the French language has been a favourite joke on the English stage since Shakespeare's day, and since Melantha and her maid are there to make this joke it was a pity to give both parts to ladies whose French accent was rather un- certain. Mr. Laurence Irving's sets were gracefully Mediterranean but I think it was unfortunate that Miss Elizabeth Haffenden made all the ladies of the Sicilian Court wear on the backs of their heads those white superstructures which in a former age adorned the