CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THE THEATRE
"You Never Can Tell." By Bernard Shaw. (Wyndham's.)
FIFTY is not normally what you might call a flattering age for a . play, particularly if it is a light comedy. Distance lends enchantment to revivals, but the 'nineties are only in the middle distance and what pleased them runs the risk of seenung to us passé without being
• "period." Today we are prepared to accept the bustle as an agent of either humour or romance ; bloomers still strike us as merely gauche and regrettable. Theoretically, the odds against Mr. Shaw seeming as funny in 1947 as he did in 1897 are considerable.
Theory, once more, proves unreliable ; you never, in fact, can tell. The comedy at Wyndham's is still, after half a century, first- class entertainment, and I think myself that the fundamental reason for this lies in Mr. Shaw's prose style. It is true that one of the principal characters is a dentist and that jokes about dentists are evergreen. But this gum-architect (as one of the characters no longer amuses us very much by calling him) can hardly carry on his shoulders the whole trivial, improbable no longer even faintly topical fantasy. Why then do we follow with delighted attention the skir- mishing in this No Man's Land somewhere between the historical and the conwmporary? Partly, of course, because the comedy is boldly, gaily and skilfully contrived : but mainly—it seems to me— because Mr. Shaw's style is so good. It is almost certainly no accident that the only other comedies of the period which bear revival are Wilde's. Mr Shaw's dialogue has not the glitter; the conscious virtuosity, of Wilde's ; but it exhibits, both on" the page and in the theatre, those qualities of discipline and harmony which make good English and which are capable of conferring vitality on works whose other excellences could not save them from oblivion. It is in other words, not :o much the things that Mr. Shaw says as the way in which he says them.
The cast is a distinguished one. Messrs. James Donald, Francis Lister, Ernest Thesiger, Harcourt Williams and D. A. Clarke-Smith are all—especially Mr. Donald—admirable. The ladies are not quite in the same class, but Miss Brenda Bruce plays a high-powered Shavian ingenue with engaging good humour.
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