"Chinese White." By Dudley Hoys. At Daly's Ma: HOTS, having
evolved an exquisitely unconvincing plot, ' has given it an Oriental setting ; since his knowledge of China appears to be nil, and since at the same time he lays on the local colour with a trowel, the resultant melodrama has the saving grace of being preposterous. The play, hovering between the improbable and the impossible and acted with resounding seriousness, has a kind of hopeleia glory ; all amateurs of incongruity will find it to their taste. The characters are puppets out of stock, so antiquated and threadbare that one would have thought them past revival, even at the hands of a parodist. The clean-limbed young missionary ; the half-caste seductress with a heart of gold ; the ruthless, tippling opium-mongers; and, finally, the Chinese bandit, trained in London, dressed in Wardour Street, and unable to open his mouth without letting fall a bogus Eastern epigram.
It is all good barn storming stuff, played pretentiously and at a"funereal pace. Some of the acting is almost as bad as the writing ; but Mr. Arthur Hardy has the authority to impose upon us his fantastically untrue conception of a Chinese bandit, and Mr. Valentine Dyall, in the embarrasaing part of the young-missionary, earns our respect as well as our
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