CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THEATRE
1" Women of Twilight." By Sylvia Rayman. (Embassy.)
Miss RAYMAN has written her first play around a revolting character who makes a comfortable income by taking unmarried mOthers and their infants into her Hampstead home and giving them poor value for good money. The scene is a slummy semi-basement, and here Mrs. Allistair's ten lodgers, among them the pregnant mistress of a condemned murderer, squabble through their uncomfortable even- ing hours of leisure while the babies yell in the " nursery " upstairs, neglected, undernourished and bitten by bed-bugs. Mrs. Allistair is a rare handler of medical and welfare officers and the charitable organisations whose job it is to find suitable homes for poor, friendless girls in trouble ; she surrounds herself with the air of philanthropy ; but a horrid little murder comes out in the end, and the cruel game is up. Virtue triumphs on the Embassy stage but it does not always triumph outside the theatre, and one is left wonder- ing just what does happen to such girls who have neither friends nor relatives to turn to and who escape the welfare of the State for some reason. The piece is very well acted by Barbara Couper, Vida Hope, Rene Ray and the rest of a company entirely of women.
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