THEATRE
Why should a reservist pretend to a courage and endurance that- are beyond him ? I maintained a bridgehead in the stalls of the Ambassadors for two acts out of three, succoured in the first interval at the Casualty Clearing Bar. Then, bomb-happy with boredom and feeling slightly sick, I withdrew—to shorten, of course, my lines of communication. In which short lines let me communicate that For Love or Money is a pastiche of a Restoration comedy by an author who has failed to observe that Wycherley 'had wit and Congreve—I have just learnt the word from Mr. Christopher Morley—concinnity. He succeeds only so far as to give his characters their characteristic names—Mr. Playbill, an actor-manager ; Hopeful, a playwright ; Colonel Bombard and Mr. Lovewell. It could have been written by a Mr. Lackwit and produced by Slowly. The author of this smut without wit could learn at the Lyric that naughtiness need not be nauseating. There, Mr. Robert Morley and Mr. David Tomlinson, the one wiggling his bare toes in an ecstasy of amiable pomposity, the other a-quiver with inane earnestness, are cast away with the wife of one, who is also the mistress of the other, on a tropic shore dazzlingly designed by Mr. Oliver Messel. Yet another castaway appears—Crown Prince or sea cook ?—to prove, if further proof were needed, that Susan (Miss Joan Tetzel) is, if not the Little Friend, at any rate the Petite Arnie of all the world.
I often doubt whether Ibsen can be as important to the play- goer as to the literary historian, and even a handsomely produced and intelligently acted revival of Rosmersholm does not shake me in my dubiety. It is not that Dr. Kroll's shocked references to freethinkers and emancipated women date it beyond recall— it doesn't matter what the characters of a play believe as long as you can believe in their believing it—but that Ibsen served Rosmer himself with such empty claptrap about nobility and regeneration. An important play cannot afford a main character so naive as this. All that even so understanding an actor as Mr. Robert Harris can do with the part is to put on a fixed smile, two acts long, of a rather improbable sweetness and hope that your inner ear will catch what Ibsen did not give him to say. This being so, the final scene fails in its dramatic impact and even Mr. Harris and Miss Signe Hasso (as Rebecca West) barely saves it from absurdity. They and Mr. Edward Chapman, as Kroll, could hardly be better, and if they are less convincing that the minor characters it is not the fault of their acting : Ibsen could write unevenly, whatever the Ibsenites may say,