Bedroom Stuff
HOTEL PARADISO. By Georges Feydeau and Maurice Desvallieres. (Winter Garden.) IT was an excellent idea to revive a French farce of the turn of the century for the benefit of Alec Guinness, Irene Worth and a first- class cast. This little trifle about M. Boniface who wants a dirty night at a not-so-clean hotel contrived to give me great amusement. It was all good rumbustious bedroom stuff with no punches pulled and hardly anything left to the imagination. Also—as so often with farce— it managed to have the bitter tang of reality about, it. The awful power of inanimate objects in crucial situations, the inability to seize I avourable opportunities which is so often due to purely fortuitous circumstance, the passive resistance of everyday routine —these
things come out of the adventures of M. Boniface with terrifying clarity. Mr. Guinness gives the little man all he has in the way of pathos and humour—which is quite a good deal—while. Miss Worth is first-rate as the other man's wife, who is the object of his advances. Add to this Martita Hunt as the dragonish Mrs. Boniface, Frank Pettingell as the never-quite-wronged husband and a bevy of other traditional figures of fun, and it will be seen that here we have that rather rare thing on the London stage—a thoroughly pro,' fessional production. Peter Glenville gives It pace while not overdoing the jokes (indeed I could have done with a little more of the chase at the end of Act 2): his direction is, in fact, quite in the spirit.of the genre. For me this was one of the funniest evenings at the theatre for
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