STAGE AND SCREEN
THE THEATRE
" Room Service." By John Murray and Allan Berete. At the Strand Theatre THE critics, rightly, found this piece uproariously funny ; and so did the audience on the night I went, though it wasn't a very big audience. Room Service isn't what you might call a considerable play, but it does provide the peg for a few remarks about Amerkan farces in. London. There was a day—which my generation is too young to remember—when French farces were the fashionable offering. They may or may not have pleased, but they made their mark : so that to this day any form of human activity which entails popping in and out of doors —whether the doors give on to a bedroom or not—may still be acceptably described as " like a French farce."
Today, however, what with improved communications and all that, the managers have put their sights up. Paris is ignored. " From the Hungarian " is the least exotic label that we may expect ; and even that is rarer than a certificate of trans-Atlantic success. Like Once in a Lifetime, like Three Men on a Horse, like Boy Meets Girl, Room Service comes to London with all the prestige that American audiences can give it. It was, and probably still is, a big success in New York. The story of it is this. An impresario with a cast of twenty-two is rehearsing a play in a New York hotel. The play is called Godspeed and (from what we hear of it) apparently aims at being described as an American Cavalcade. The impresario is resourceful but penniless. The author of the play—sud- denly arriving from Oswego—is, though equally penniless, not resourceful, being in fact a callow, leggy youth.
;The hotel management), 'whose representatives are far from callow, is rootedly opposed to the 'idea of pennilessness either in its clients or—as a consequence—in-itself. The structure of the play is therefore mainly-composed of subterfuges—shifts which will, keep the wolf from the door until the curtain has gone up on a success. These shifts include—among other things --casting the White Russian waiter (forinerly of Stanislaysky's Owh) for a leading part on condition that he serves an illicit meal' to the impresario and his abettors and making the coltish author sham dead to keep the police out of -the imprisario's headquarters. The best bit in the play is tlit climax of this ruse. The author fails to keep up his death- throes long enough and expires before his first night is over and the scenery is safe from the bailiffs. It therefore becomes necessary to prolong matters by saying a few reverent words over the corpse. " Unhappy youth," laments the impresario, " he died too soon " ; the last two words are as full of venom as of double entendre. The corpse finally calls his own and everybody else's bluff by resurrecting himself in order to be sick.
Of course, it all comes right in the end and gives the audience a 'thoroughly enjoyable evening. Room Service is probably the funniest play to be seen in London now. It may, never- theless, fail, as other American farces have failed before it. If it does, it deserves to. The production at the. Strand Theatre is second or third rate. Mr. William Swetland, it is true, gives a peerless performance as the director of the play—solemnly preposterous, irrationally wise; and Mr. Hartley Power is adequate, if not conspicuously inspired, as the impre- sario. But too many of the others are second strings to second strings. The ladies are almost as bad as their clothes ; and the actor who comes on to wind the proceedings up lets every- thing down with a bang just when everything ought to have gone up (with a bang) like a rocket. The play might have been memorably, instead of merely, diverting. We could so easily have been made to care about the fate of Godspeed. If the Russian waiter, reading his part, had sounded really good, . . . if the author had had something more than his plight to recommend him, . . . if the leading lady had given some sign of histrionic ability. If these and other things had happened, Room Service would be good for a year in London. As it is, it's the funniest play we can hope to see until America sends. us another first-rate comed3 wit a second- rate cast. It has a flavour of the Marx Brothers about it, and the stage is- dominated by a stuffed moose bead which (together with two. owls) turns upon Broadway for just the right sort of ridiculous reasons. PETER FLEMING.
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