"Champagne for Delilah." By Ronald Millar. (New.)
THE idea of a successful dramatist who is, like David Normandy in this farcical comedy, to all intents and purposes a figment of his own imagination, and who sees his life and the other people in it as the raw material for successive coups de theatre, is serviceable if not exactly new. But you can have, even in a farcical comedy, too many layers of unreality, and that is the trouble with this one. If David Normandy and his background had corresponded, even roughly, to anything in real life, his passion for theatricalising him- self might have been interesting ; but he and everything about him are already so phoney, so coated as it were with grease-paint, that however hard he tries he cannot make himself seem more artificial than he already is. There is nothing truly dramatic in the spectacle of a man pretending to be mad if we can see quite clearly that he is a lunatic already.
But for all that there are amusing moments in this, the theatre's latest excursion into back-stage life. (The first, I suppose, was made by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream. If only his successors could manage to inject into their high-flown characters some of the reality which transfigures Snug and Quince and the rest of them !) Easily the best thing in the play is the performance of Miss Irene Worth as a Hollywood star, so sultry on celluloid, so unassailable at the " Caprice," with whom the playwright's sense of the dramatic resolves him to have an affair. As his wife Miss Googie Withers acts with a great deal of charm and wit and intel- ligence, and betWeen them these two ladies do wonders for the play. Mr. Nigel Patrick does not, and perhaps was given no chance to, make the playwright anything but a brisk, uninteresting puppet. Those wishing to get an idea of what sort of a play this is need only take a look at the setting for Acts II and III—" The Normandys' country place, 20 miles from Shaftesbury Avenue " ; it will tell them everything they need to know.
PETER FLEMING.
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