WITH wit neither private nor piercing, humour not too blunt
and sentiment nowise mawkish, the lightfoot evening speeds away and leaves no nastiness behind. This is the gayest, deftest and most polished revue one has seen for a long time. Some things please more than others, but I look in vain through the programme to find anything that has no pleasure at all to offer. Where the stuff is thinnish, the performance makes up for it. Consider, for example, Mr George Benson doing a cock-eyed translation from a book of French recipes ; he is so agreeable as to persuade us almost that the like has never been done before. Or his demonstration, with appropriate noises, of a suburban husband busy with the coke-scoop at his nocturnal duties—another small victory of manner over matter.
But in general the charming company is well served by the writers, especially Mr. Arthur Macrae and Mr. Paul behn, who have let drip no acid of malice or bitterness into their ink. No, it is eminently good-natured, and when the company come to mockery, it is done with the joyousness of understanding and an air of absolute amiability. The most outrageous reduction to absurdity is a rousing excerpt from Ghosts as it might be recreated by the modern American masters of the musical show, but Miss Dora Bryan's Freudian version of Cinderella, delivered in a glutinous Middle European accent, runs it a close second. Then there is Miss Joan Heal, a handsome girl whose looks and voice and figure are dedicated to the service of grotesquerie. As an American masochist eager to torture herself by visiting Britain, or as Sweet Belinda stuck in her sedan chair, or as the half-cleaned picture who wants to remain a dirty one, she well deserves the riot of applause. Miss lilies Hall most sweetly animates Manet's barmaid ; Mr. Graham Payn has some pleasant songs to sing, and Mr. Ian Carmichael tells lispingly the gruesome tale of the Darling Boy who strangles his papa. These are other happy moments. The exuberant and friendly show is directed by Mr. William Chappell and decorated
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