"0 Mistress Mine." By Ben Travers. At the St. James's
Waste would b an apt title for this play, too. A good theatre, an author expert in farce, a brilliant comedienne, a plot well spiced with both domestic and foreign topicality—and the result ? The result is almost exactly analogous to the hot bath which, tired and chilled, you approach with delicious anticipation : and which turns out to be lukewarm. Mlle. Printemps is a queen, smuggled out of Ardenburg where everything is far from as you like it during a revolution. Her deliverer (M. Pierre Fresnay) conceals her, with the minimum of resourcefulness, in England ; and, when at last she is absolved of her constitutional responsibilities, wins her hand (a conquest comparable to the Italian occupation of Gore). The characters are out of stock, the plot has long been on the shelf; but there was plenty of scope at least for bedroom fireworks, and even these we were denied. Tentatively prurient, never witty, and not less perfunctory than pantomime couplets, Mr. Travers' dialogue moves towards the third act curtain at a hack's pace. A glimpse of Mlle. Printemps, who by some alchemy can make the cheapest joke an epigram whose substance is fortunately forgettable, is indeed enchantingly vouchsafed. But M. Fresnay, an actor of proved brilliance, fails, surprisingly, in a part which calls only for that genial competence which so many English players are almost too ready to purvey ; and, since it is the part on which the conduct of the plot entirely depends, his ' weakness is fatal to whatever slender chances the play
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