Two MUSKETEERS? Two * Blind Mice? It would be perfectly possible, yet
even as we concede the possibility we are conscious that there lacketh something still. " We take no note of T4rrie," the poet Young remarks, " but from its loss." Can this be true also of Groucho ? Certainly I was never able quite to take in all that Harpo and Chico were up to, because every time a gentleman in the audience joined in with a particularly distinctive laugh (and there were several such gentlemen in the audience) I thought nervously that here was the missing link and that incredible moustache was about to swim before me. And so as I write it is only about the absent Groucho that I have any illusions. Harpo and Chico I have seen in the flesh, and now in retrospect they appear a little less than life-size. Accomplished, lovable, funny, all these—they turn out to be only human after all.
Harpo looks like an excellent copy of himself by a minor master in the same school, but the things he is given to do are unworthy of him. Once only, for a few minutes, is this magnificent mime, sitting mute and adoring at the feet of a lovely singer, allowed to move us with pity and love by the perfect set of an eyebrow and the droop of an under-lip. Most of the rest of the time he is popping on and off the stage without useful purpose. It is no encouragement to a great comic to give him a pair of cardboard pantomime scissors three feet long to run after the girls with. Chico, possibly a lesser artist than his brother, is in the present show the more convincing. His voice endears him at once to everybody, for what he says and how he says it. His timing and rhythm are perfect. He is the sort of person one wants to go and shake hands with ; he reinforces our feeling that there must be good somewhere in the world.
CHRISTOPHER ADAMS.
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