CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THE THEATRE
"Peace Comes to Peckham." By R. F. Delderfield. (Princes Theatre.)
IT is not so much with the advent of .peace as with the return of Master and Miss Palfrey that this comedy is concerned. As children they were evacuated to America, and the end of the war brings them back to the scarred austerity of Mafeking Street, young adults with American accents, American wardrobes and something like an American outlook. They find Peckham groggy but game. Their mother has been injured by a bomb, but for some reason which was neither clear to me nor (I suspect) particularly true to human nature is at great pains to conceal the fact from her son and daughter. The daughter's childhood sweetheart has won the George Medal, and beneath the sulphurous exterior of a Dead End Kid his young brother dissembles the record of heroic deeds in the blitz. Harry and Gloria, brash newcomers from an unscathed continent, find it difficult to adjust themselves to a milieu in which battle-honours are so plentiful and so readily mulled over ; and Gloria's sophistica- tion makes as little appeal to her old sweetheart as Harry's high- flown ambition does to his feckless father. Matters are further complicated by an American suitor who calls for Gloria but falls for Grace (a sister who did not go to America).
But it all ends happily. It was bound to. Kind hearts are more than jitterbugs and simple faith than chewing-gum, and Mr. Delder- field's Peckham is so rich, so (almost) embarrassingly rich in the sturdy virtues traditionally associated with the British working-class that we knew all along that everyone would get his, deserts. The comedy is slight but deft, and only invites criticism where its fidelity to the externals of working-class life contrast too markedly with its rather treacly approach to the underlying realities of human nature.
The cast is quite good. Mr. Leslie Dwyer, as the head of the Palfrey family, is a new comedian who should go a long way. Miss Bertha Belmore portrays with effective gusto a district nurse with an evangelical bent, Miss Ella Retford invests the mother with dignity and charm, and all the younger generation do well, especially Miss Diana Decker and Miss Myrtle Reed. If you need persuading that the British, besides being fairly comic people, have their hearts and their guts in the right place, Mr. Delderfield can probably do
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