Roundabout
Executioners
AT A THEATRE first night it is easy to spot the critics. They have the most accessible seats rather than the best seats. They are scattered round the edge of the auditorium, and lined along the aisles, like men Who have always been afraid they were going to be in a fire. The regular first-nighter soon gets to recognise them and an occasional snooper has even been known to look over their shoulders to read an advance notice on the scribbling pad. Usually, if he can read the scraWl, he will see only 'NB. Don't forget dentist tomorrow' or `Expenses --two whiskies for press agent.' There is Mr. Harold Hobson of the small glit- tering eye and the jaunty sparrow head—which- eyer way the other cats jump, he will always be facing in the opposite direction on Sunday. There Is Mr. Kenneth Tynan, folded into his seat like a hinged ruler, and after the lights are safely down donning, with surgical precision, his Gestapo Spectacles. There is Mr. Milton Shulman, silver- coiffured and swarthy-jowled, scribbling through a hundred numbered folios as though he intended to pirate an acting copy of the play. There is Mr. Derek Monsey, languid and elegant, with the sears from his fellow critics' daggerwork on his own Play stilFgleaming in the footlights' glow. But at the cinema premiere the film critics are Weyer seen. They review their films in the morn- ings and afternoons. They can be seen scurrying across the foyers of the empty West End cinemas ,,at 10.30 a.m., eager to hurry into the warm plush u, arkness. They come out again at midday, blink- ing owlishly in the sunlight, and looking rather lliitY, like children who have been scoffing a box of chocolates before tea. There seems to be some rule that old critics like in celluloid hours, that is) get to look 111ke the faces they see on the screen. There is Miss 3 ilys Powell, who has taken some of the nose- Wrinkling, tapered-eyed Gallic chic of Miss Fran- ,Oise Rosay. There is Miss C. A. Lejeune, apple- eheeked and tweedy as a sister of Miss Margaret ,Kotherford. Mr. Fred Majdalany and Mr.
but Mosley have become not like film stars out like each other—chubby, cheerful, chatty ........__ Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Mr. Philip Oakes • has even been asked for autographs by fans of Mr. Van Johnson.
Films are taking more and more space in the popular papers, especially in the Daily Express, where Lord Beaverbrook now gives almost as much praise to the Empire (Leicester Square) as he does to the British Empire. Advertising, like adversity, makes strange bedfellows 'and the booming profits of commercial television have drawn all other forms of mass entertainment be- neath one patchwork quilt. Film critics have lost that stricken, one-month-to-live look they all wore a couple of years ago. The chances are that if their editors continue to pamper them they will soon be considered as important as the gossip columnists.
Victims
THE AUDIENCE filed down the spiral wooden track holding on to the rope banister with their right hands. Soon the tent-roofed tower was full with holidaymakers wound like a caterpillar army round the inside walls. They all stared down at a great rubber-lined drum in the centre of the floor.
The more daring members of the audience clambered into the drum and stood about self- consciously unheroic like the crew of the first spaceship to the moon. The little door in the wall slammed shut. The girls smoothed down their skirts and patted their hair. The men adjusted their ties and grinned at each other. The children transferred bags of sweets from one pocket to another in search of the safest spot. The drum began to turn slowly and then more and more quickly. The people inside were a little crouched, alert. for some kind of attack. Then the drum began to whirl like a dynamo and the bottom fell out, leaving the people pinned to the walls like specimens of twentieth-century man in an outer- galactic museum.
Inside the drum the people felt heavier than elephants. It was as though they were trying to crawl from a swimming bath in a lead-lined diving suit. They felt lonely, though they were part of a now grotesque gallery of dummies with skirts round their waists, jackets humped over their ears, trousers as short and corrugated as paper lanterns. Everywhere they looked seemed up—all directions had lost their meaning. Looking down they felt the picture on the retinas of their eyes distort and buckle like a photograph burning on a fire. Their brains seemed to be toppling out of their mouths and spindling down the centre of a maelstrom.
Suddenly one of the drum-dwellers came alive. He knocked off his invisible shackles and stood, legs apart, on the side of the drum leaning inwards parallel to the floor. The others struggled to imi- tate him. They knotted their heavy cannon-ball muscles and with a supreme weight-lifter's effort they raised a little finger. The drum began to slow and the weight began to slim away. Soon it was idling gently round and the people fell quietly to the floor like dead flies.
As they walked out the solid ground seemed like sponge cake and the sun looped the loop among the trees. The colours of Battersea Fun Fair were unbearably bright and fuzzy at the edges. It was Whitsun and the time for enjoyment. Ahead loomed the challenge of the Big Dipper. Around the Knock-The-Lady-Out-Of-Bed stall, a gaping blank-eyed crowd is gathered. The aim is to hurl a wooden ball at a bell-push and precipi- tate a lip-sticked girl wrapped with a blanket into a pool of sawdust. They gather like blood- connoisseurs at a street accident—only here they know that the accident is about to occur and they have had time to elbow around for a good view. They wait. The showman shakes his brilliantined locks and waits. But no Ivanhoe steps forth to open the joust. No Philistine bends his back to cast the first stone. The crowd mutters and melts away leaving behind to mark the spot three splat- tered ice-creams, an empty bag of peanuts and a copy of the Daily Mirror. Strawberryade and a hamburger and on we go.
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