5 JANUARY 1924, Page 18

THE THEATRE.

THE LYCEUM PANTOMIME.

Jack and the Beanstalk is a thoroughgoing, crude, traditional pantomime, complete in every detail. There is a beautiful cat, marvellously true to life, which washes itself, as all good cats do, behind the ears ; a wonderful, ambling, broken- backed cow which looks as if it had escaped from an early Italian Nanette and there is the comic man-woman—Dame Dimple, Jack's Mother—carroty haired, incurably comic and so irrepressible that even at the awful moment when the giant enters, growling, " Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum—I smell the blood of an Englishman : I smell fresh English meat," she ignores the risk of discovery and death and loudly deduces :— " Then he doesn't deal at our butcher's." Then there is, of course, the fascinating Principal Boy, Jack, a lady in blue tights, who climbs the beanstalk and reaches a land whose glittering and tropical vegetation changes form and colour continually before our eyes while its inhabitants change colour correspondingly as they indulge in universal and incessant ballet. This, of course, is the Transformation Scene dear to every child. The giant is a disappointing giant. His face Is fretful and his knees are weak : he is an object for pity and encouragement rather than for terror. But the cooks in his kitchen are wonderful people. They are of all sizes—three of them are dwarfs, hardly three feet high—and they tumble on to the stage down the kitchen chimney and out of the ovens, and proceed to execute feverish acrobatics in a truly amazing fashion. Then there are Master Kiddy King in a sailor suit who does things with plates, top-hats, and billiard-balls which I have never seen equalled, and an individual called Baby Love, hardly bigger than a good-sized beetle and aged apparently about three, who executes a charming and guileless ballet-dance.

A century has passed away since I last went to the pantomime, and I am interested to note that it has not changed in the smallest respect, 'except that the dances arc unmistakably influenced by the Russians and the music, when the composer happens to remember, by Debussy & Co. Otherwise, all is exactly the same. But I, alas I am not the same. To me the elaborate and glittering scenery was tawdry and vulgar, the play empty and badly constructed, the good old jokes vacant, the ballets interminable, the dresses crude and hideous in colour, and the whole thing unlit by one spark of imagination. But I am wrong, and I have the sense to know it. The audience was enough to prove it. Young and old, they roared at the jokes, cooed with rapture at the ballets and transformation scene, and departed at the end of four hours with obvious reluctance. In no West-end theatre does one ever see such delighted enthusiasm.

As for me, the only actor who disarmed me was the irresist- ible Mr. George Jackley, with his white face, scarlet nose, infinitely adaptable mouth, and enchanting changes of expression from blank and frozen dismay to fatuous and gaping glee. I succumbed completely, too, to the 'bus scene, when the scenery and the 'bus-wheels went round and rapidly revolving strips of floor caused breathless sprints and incredible accidents among the strange company—including, of course, Jack's carroty-haired Mother—who were continually trying to board or alight from the vehicle. The harlequinade at the end, with clown and pantaloon sharing-out in the fore- ground, Columbine and Harlequin pirouetting on and off in the background, and the culminating battle when the air is thick with hurtling carrots, cauliflowers, bloaters and strings of sausages, completed the performance in the correct