CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THEATRE
"The Man With the Umbrella." By Louis Ducreux. English adaptation by Roma June. (Duchess.)
THE best kind of tricks are tricks which comprise, or anyhow appear to comprise, an element of risk, a sporting chance, that they will not come off. Trick photography is rather a dull business because we know that we shall never be shown a failure ; and for roughly similar reasons it is difficult to be keenly interested in M. Ducreux's experiment with the normal conventions of stagecraft. Aldo Sweet, the Man with the Umbrella, is his principal character ; a mysterious figure, impish in many of his attitudes, god-like in some of his powers, he seems at times to be a sort of acting, unpaid archangel, a frivolous version of the Inspector in that admirable play of Mr. Priestley's. - As' if this was not singularity enough, he frequently steps outside the play to tell us what is going to happen next, or arrests its action to give a running commentary on it This is not a new trick, and as played here it does not seem a particularly good one. The dowdy little girl whose career the Man with the Umbrella takes in hand was a puppet already before he became her puppet-master ; and the tale of her carefully engineered rise in the world is a simple one which hardly needs the elaborate footnotes which her facetious Svengali is called on to provide.
But for all that the play has a certain quality, a kind of freshness. If we are by no means enthralled, we are at least disarmed ; the rabbits, the rather small rabbits, which the author to the accompani- ment of much patter extracts from his top-hat have an engaging naiveté. Mr. Charles Goldner, who is called upon to do most of the conjuring, is at times perhaps a little too conscious of his own virtuosity, but he bustles the entertainment along as though it were (what perhaps it ought to have been) a music-hall sketch and never lapses into the pretentious. Miss Sheila Burrell is quite good as the girl whose destinies he directs in such detail, and Mr. Ronald Simpson contributes a delicate and charming sketch of an amorous
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