CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THE THEATRE
IS' Buoyant Billions." By Bernard Shaw. (Princes.) MR. SHAW calls his latest play (noticed on this page when it first appeared at Malvern) "a comedy of no manners," but jamais La politesse has always been one of his mottoes and a lack of courtesy is not the most conspicuous deficiency of Buoyant Billions. It is really a piece of dramatic doodling, with no plot and no particular purpose, and although we all much prefer that the hand of so great a master should doodle rather than lie idle, it is no use pretending that the result is a minor work of art.
A young reformer, reconnoitring the world which he means to improve, is lucky enough to come across Miss Frances ray, who lives in a hut in the swamps of Panama charming the local reptiles with a saxophone. They fall in love with each other. Miss Day is the only child by his first marriage of Buoyant, a billionaire. She returns to London to find the numerous children of his second marriage (most of whom, oddly enough, appear to be considerably older than she is) assembled in a room in their father's house in Belgrave Square. An elaborate but strikingly unsuccessful attempt has been made to convert this room into a replica of a Chinese temple, and it is presided over by a Wardour Street celestial whom Mr. Buoyant addresses as "Mahatma." Here, after a great deal of talk about anything that comes into the dramatist's mind, the reformer reappears, the lovers are affianced and, after some more talk, the curtain falls. This is not, nor indeed is any of Mr. Shaw's works, one of those plays in which what matters is not so much what they say as the way they say it. His ideas, though they crowd somewhat inconse- quently on each other's heels, are explicitly stated, though few of them arc developed very far. The raw material of the play really Consists of a number of unwritten (or, anyhow, unpublished) letters to The Times. Marriage and Marxism, hunting and shooting, the atom bomb and the Christian religion, the universities and the trade unions—these and other topics are the coconuts at which Mr. Shaw ebulliently shies. He never misses ; but I do not think it is unfair to say that the thud with which the coconuts fall to the ground is sometimes rather a dull one.
Miss Frances Day leads the original Malvern cast with great dash and distinction, and Mr. Esme Percy's production does its best to overcome the discrepancy between the vastness of the theatre and
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