STAGE AND SCREEN
THE THEATRE
Revudeville" (141st Edition). At the Strike Up the Music." At the Coliseum.
THE Windmill Theatre, alone of London theatres, can proudly boast that the blitz has never caused it to close. The art-nude has remained precariously upon her perch; those magnificent old bon- netted ladies, Biddy and Fanny, have continued to add to the confusion of the English language; indeed, in its tenth year Revudeville was never more spruce (whoever designed the dresses for the one hundred and forty-first edition deserves particular praise). It is odd how little this war has affected the revues and music-halls. The atmosphere of strenuous patriotism must have gone with Mr. Noel Coward to Australia. Apart from an opening song by the nubile squadron—" We're bound to win the victory for freedom and for right "—the war is not really touched on .at all. Biddy and Fanny remain the best turn (it was a pity to renovate their old black skirts and frowsy bonnets), and Miss Valerie Tandy among the Revudebelles is obviously bound for stardom.
The spirit of the Coliseum—which I picture as something rather stark and Catiline with the thin legs of an extra in Julius Caesar—obstinately sabotages a revue producer. Scenery tails off on the long bleak stage; exits are uncomfortably protracted—so that Mr. Douglas Byng, retiring absentmindedly from his bath- chair without his skirt, has to walk almost as far as a batsman returning to the pavilion. M. Gaston Palmer, the most amusing juggler I can remember seeing, tries in vain to get a little co- operation from an audience engulfed in the huge dark cavern— nothing could be less intimate. But any revue with Mr. Byng in it must be seen; Mr. Byng sailing nervously at a greater height than he is used to as the Goddess of Wind; Mr. Byng as an A.T.S. officer with an admirable new song about Hitler—" What the Hell are we going to do with that moustache? "; Mr. Byng as the Queen of the Circus. Mr. Esdaile's productions have always some big mystifying set pieces, and the spirit of the Coliseum made these on the opening night a little more Surrealist than was intended. A nude apparently floating in the dark would be sud- denly whisked out of sight, and then reappear as a pair of feet only; stage carpenters' hands would stick out in the middle of a ballet, and once the producer's own voice could be heard off-stage . addressing the curtain—with a Shavian epithet of anger and despair. This pleased the audience, and didn't really make the
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