" It Happened in September." At the St. James's Theatre.
THE THEATRE
AN unskilled cook might well imagine that the secret ot making a most successful dish was to put into it something for everybody's palate. Indeed, there is in an eighteenth century book a caution to the unwary and unpractised cook in the shape of an imaginary recipe for a salad. Trus recipe specifies some of this, that and the other mouth-watering delicacy—in fact, a morsel of every conceivable edible ingredient, and then goes on to say, "After mixing well, open a large window and throw" out the whole mess." Had I been standing by Mr. Beverley Baxter when he had finished concocting this olla podrida of a play I should have tendered him similar advice ; but no doubt it wou_d have have been tendered in vain, for was not this mixture of everything the principle (if such a verbal degradation be permissible!) of most popular daily newspapers before the present war? Sensation, sentimentality, melodrama— all things to al men, and women! That was notoriously the popular recipe, and the standard of public taste seethed low enough to justify it from a purely commercial point of view. Well, here is Mr. Beverley Baxter, who as one-time editor of the Daily Express should certainly know what is popular, producing a play on the same recipe, and the box-office will show whether his estimate of the public taste is correct or not. But even then I am not so sure that the recipe is proved correct. The appetite for news and the appetite for drama are too strong to be easily thwarted. If excellent food is unobtainable we have to eat what we can get; hence the frequent immense circulation of poor newspapers and the success of poor plays. Mr. Baxter, in this theatrical jumble-sale about the war and its causes, has emptied out all his emotional and intellectual baggage, and the result is literally like nothing on earth. The characters have no relation to life ; the opinions and ideas come from the waste- paper baskets of newspaper-offices, even the pictures on the wall of the house where the action of the play is supposed to take place, change from scene to scene to symbolise the change in the annual political notions of its inhabitant. What can one say of a piece which shows no sign of dramatic intelligence or sensibility and is such a disordered mixture of crude symbolism, artificiality and strenuous catching at every possible effect? Only this, that it is precisely what is wrong with this play that has been wrong with the world which Mr. Baxter's puppets criticise, and it is dreadful to think that an ex-newspaper editor and present-day Member of Parliament should be so superficial as not to be aware of it.
JAMES REDFERN.
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