Diversion " No. 2. At Wyndham's.
THE second edition of Diversion is a great improvement on the first. Miss Edith Evans instead of reading us poetry recites one of Elizabeth's speeches to the Commons, which she is too good an actress to leave as the propaganda it was intended to be. (Astuteness is the key-note rather than patriotic ardour.) Miss Joyce Grenfell deals this time with the local library: like a high explosive bomb, she leaves no institution she touches quite the same. Mr. Peter Utsinov shows us, with accuracy and venom, three producers tackling King Lear—the foreign, the proletarian and the Sunday night. There is a study of a Hertfordshire Peasant by Mr. Bernard Miles, which is as sound and deeply thought out as 'Will Rogers' study of the cowboy, and a very pretty song called " Nanty Puts Her Hair Up." Pretty : that is still the main trouble with Mr. Farjeon's revue. Compare its satire with that of the Unity Theatre's pantomime and how it wilts—like some gentle flower grown in the shallow soil of a garden suburb. And yet there was a time when Mr. Farjeon could write savagely enough: his " Literary Widows " will be remembered by one member of his old Comedy audience long after those elegant period pieces—the Watteau shepherdess, the Edwardian picnic, the Victorian Highlands—are forgotten. But as long as Miss Dorothy Dickson holds the stage prettiness has its excuse. Can it really be 16 years since I went—five times in a
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