The Show Goes On By HONOR CROOME 0 UTSIDE, the
crowd drifts happily but wearily down the Haymarket, ignoring the sparse traffic, the soft intermittent rain, the still keen northerly wind. Propped under the portico, two girls—duffle-coated, dis- hevelled, obvious survivors of a night and a day on the incle- ment paving-stones--exchange final impressions : Wasn't it a perfect day ? Smashing ! If only those photographs come out . . . Wizard ! Inside, it is business as usual, King Magnus facing his constitutional crisis, pitting wit and exquisite manners against political tirade and the mob's illusion; the Old .Master, G. B. S., now startlingly hitting the bull's eye, now wildly off target, now just plain silly, now more subtly out of date, voicing his commentary on the day's greater drama. More pusillani- mous managements may shut the theatre doors on Coronation Night, despairing of their power to compete against fireworks and sheer satiety; but the Apple Cart is to be upset as usual.
Not quite as usual—so the cast are at pains to make clear. The' house is undoubtedly thin. " Asleep in the stalls, poor darlings, and what else can you expect, after they've been on their feet since four in the morning ! Reliable laughs do not come, exits generally good for a hearty round of applause rate a few scattered hand claps. But from the wings, at all events, the gusto of the play seems unimpaired, the cutting edge of the dialogue unblunted. There are, it is true, unrehearsed effects. Discipline behind the scenes is not quite what, on another night, one would expect; King Magnus, rising in wrathful majesty, strides to the rear of the stage and enjoins his secretary to " turn those workmen out of the library "- an effective line, but not in Shaw's original text. A naughty Cabinet Minister passes an uncalled-for and unscripted remark on a colleague's remarkable hat. It is well received.
If there is distraction in the air, there is enthusiasm, too; the remainder of a larger impetus, echoes of a solemn exhilara- tion. " / stand for the future and the past, for the posterity that has no vote and the tradition that never had any. I stand for the great abstractions.: for conscience and virtue; for the eternal against the expedient; for the evolutionary appetite against the day's gluttony. . . ." The manifesto of monarchy breaks up in a shower of Shavian rhetoric, dated Fabianism. beautifully turned and beautifully irrelevant; but for a moment the central note has been truly struck, and the theatre is hushed as Mr. Noel Coward states—perhaps with more solemnity than usual; if so, he will not confess it—the case for the Crown. There is a lighter topical touch in the opening lines, the tragic story of the ' raging emotional diehard Ritualist '" who, after a lifetime happily spent in getting up " pageants and Lord Mayor's shows and military tattoos and big public ceremonies," died of solitude, driven melancholy mad by three weeks on an uninhabited Scottish islet. There is, inevitably, a great deal that rings false and hollow, falser and hollower today.
If the King can speak his part with a greater sense of fitness than usual, the Powermistress General is much less happy about hers. This particular Powermistress General is, in private life —so Miss Margaret Rawlings explains as she smoothly meta- morphoses herself into the formidable ex-schoolmistress Lysistrata—the wife of just such a " wicked capitalist " as Shaw loved to pillory and as she has nightly to denounce. She has spent this day entertaining the firm's Coronation guests from every Dominion, and the experience has heightened an understandable pride in an honest job of work well done, over a lifetime, for more than money's worth; in a business built up from scratch to world-wide reputation, in a solid contribution to general prosperity, greater knowledge, fuller stomachs and friendlier relations. " Breakages, Limited 1 " she says scorn- fully. " Silly, wicked nonsense." Nut no one would guess, as Lysistrata's voice breaks with impotent rage on the final cadences of her tirade, that she has only managed to achieve that ringing sincerity by mentally substituting a private bete noire for Shaw's turnip fiend. Is it matter for grievance, this evening's job to be done as usual on a day when the world at large is carefree, footloose, and rejoicing ? Not, it would seem, to the cast of The Apple,. Cart. They have watched the real thing, on the screen or in the flesh; some of them have every right to be as leg-weary as the audience for whose exhaustion they feel so much sympathy. But this evening's performance, the familiar settling into harness, is rather a satisfaction than otherwise. It rounds off the day; it canalises emotions which have, perhaps, got a little out of hand. (" I've cried so much that my make- up won't go on properly.") No one is straining at the leash, counting the minutes to freedom for a dash to the fireworks. The indomitable King Magnus, once divested of his royal • state, will move on to the next of the four shows on his night's schedule; his courtiers, Cabinet and family, and Orinthia the' Beloved, magnificent in her zebra gown, are soberly intent on a bite of supper and .bed. They have, perhaps, lived the day's drama more intensely , than most of us; not only because of that readier susceptibility of feeling which traditionally marks their profession, but because, confronted with this supremely elaborate and mag- nificent spectacle, that profession inevitably makes them vicarious participants. They have taken the measure of today's achievement, merely as a piece of consummate stage produc- tion. They have watched in a dual capacity; loyal subjects, citizens of an ancient State, stirred by ritual and pageantry, and professionals agog with anxious sympathy as crisis after potential crisis looms and is triumphantly surmounted—by performers whose lack of experience they, more than anyone else, can fully appreciate. The nightly recessional of stage royalty is over, the make- up is off, the lights are out, there are goodnights on the damp pavement outside the stage door, hospitable invitations, a dispersal of cars nosing through a' crowd that has grown denser, happier than ever, and apparently much less weary. The fireworks soar and crackle exultantly over the South Bank. The kingdom and the power and the glory will pass froni us and leave us naked, face to face with our real selves at tast. . . • Maybe. But it is pleasant to reflect, walking home on Corona- tion Night over Waterloo Bridge, that the Britain of today bears even less resemblance to Shaw's entertainingly perverse imag- inings than did that Britain which, nearly a quarter.of a century ago, first acclaimed The Apple Cart.
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