The Theatre
[" A DAMSEL IN DISTRESS." BY IAN HAY AND P. G. WODE- HOUSE. AT THE NEW THEATRE. " AREN'T WOMEN WONDER- FUL ! " BY HARRIS DEANS. AT THE COURT THEATRE. " SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER." BY OLIVER GOLDSMITH. AT
THE LYRIC, HAMMERSMITH.]
IT was pleasant to hear the pit laugh, the other night, at the New Theatre—a huge, packed pit, recalling the good old days when actors played to that part of the house, as one suspects that all in the cast of A Damsel in Distress will be uproariously doing as the run is prolonged. Mr. lIenry Kendall already sets the pace and contrives to dominate the scene, as he two- steps across it, the perfect picture of Reggie Higgins, who is a sort of comic chorus punctuating the wild adventure.
Reggie is a stunningly bright boy. With high aristocratic connexions, and an accent that would sound above the crashing crockery in any tea-shop rendezvous, his good things and his things not so good, his least gurgle and grunt, are saluted with what used to be known as salvoes of applause. And what is he up to, all the time—to be so frightfully funny ? Reggie's job is to keep everybody cheerful, while he refuses to marry the aristocratic Lady Maud Marsh (Miss Jane Baxter) and dumbly or gurglingly pursues the Earl of Marshmoreton's lady secretary, in the baronial halls, which, in the scene that really amuses the stalls, as well as the pit, are shown to tourists by the Earl's incomparable butler. (Let me salute Mr. Aubrey Mather for his rotund performance of this part.) The Earl is played with a comic snarl by Mr. Clive Currie. He is quite the bookie in manners and appearance, but you never know where bad blood may leak through in these great houses. This one achieved another weak spot in the semi- imbecile Lord Totleigh (son and heir) who pursued his sister, Lady Maud, into the stage door of the Regality Theatre, as she was apparently pursuing a poet : to be thereafter incessantly pursued in turn by the light lyrical composer, George Bevan, who is Mr. Basil Foster, and who therefore in the end wins Lady Maud, though he has to don and doff a light moustache, to wear a footman's plum-coloured livery, and to leap over a baronial balustrade before doing so. And it isn't these feats—to do Lady Maud justice—that help him to win, so much as Mr. Foster's quiet sincerity in taking her first refusal, coupled with her disappointment when she does at last find her poet, and finds that he's grown too fat and eats too much. Basil—I mean George—wins. They all win—except the butler and Miss Helen Haye, as an admonishing sort of worldly aunt who tries, in Miss Haye's
genuinely aristocratic manner, to make people see reason in a rollicking farce. But one quite likes these two for so quietly failing to pursue and pick up anybody in the midst of all the loud bright things said and done by everybody else, including the idiot Earl. He delights the pit by not being a snob and by picking up a strident American tourist lady in his own house.
The play ought to win, too—at any rate till winter comes and saddens us. It is much more in the traditional tone of farce than the other light, but slightly sentimental, enter- tainment at the Court, where I suppose Sir. Barry Jackson is trying out one of his " pot-boilers "—a " comedy " on the theme of What Every Woman Knows. They (the women) know that they are wonderful, because they know also that they can pilot silly men to success ; as Con Hawley did for her engineering husband Ben : possibly a good inventor, but evidently, in other matters, a dolt, as Mr. Ralph Richardson shows him up. There are rich hoary humours here, too—particularly in a first act of low life below stairs ; but they are not so wildly risible as those of Mr. Ian Hay and Mr. P. G. Wodehouse.
The refreshing laughter of a delighted audience sounded again at Sir Nigel Playfair's revival of She Stoops to Conquer.
The Lyric, Hammersmith, has trained its devoted public into enthusiasm for these " pieces of antiquity." This is not said patronizingly of them ! Their improbabilities are not so absurd as those of the two latest comedies I have just men- tioned ; and they have the advantage of a " fruity " old- English style which gives the players something to get their teeth into—a thing that players don't, however, seem much inclined to do in these days. Thus, there is a certain tenuity or over-delicacy of tone and gesture at Hammersmith. I have seen Mrs. Hardcastles less presentable in appearance, and therefore more downright comic, than Miss Renee de Vaux ; Tony Lumpkins more boorish than Sir Nigel Playfair, who is a thoroughly genial jester with intermittent rusticity of accent ; above all, Mr. Hardcastles less timid, crestfallen, effaced, than Mr. Hay Petrie, whose sense of humour seems to have been defeated by the pathos in Mr. Hardcastle's situation as host, mistaken for innkeeper by a Young Marlow whom Mr. Brian Aherne makes gallant, but a little too stern, a little forbidding, even in the sentimental scenes. As Kate Hardcastle, Miss Marie Ney occasionally reminds us of the delicious artifices of Miss Evans in the Restoration comedies against which good plain Oliver Goldsmith is supposed to have reacted. But hers is, on the whole, a charming per- formance. So much, then, for the acting.
Of the production and setting one must say that they are less high-fantastical, less mannered and " stylized " than others by Sir Nigel. Miss Hardcastle has her song, which, of course, is encored. But no candles are extinguished to the incidental music which I dislike even more than Sir Nigel does that between the acts ; though that too—I agree with him—may be very tiresome. Goldsmith had thought of -calling his comedy The Old House or the New Inn. The title expresses its central idea. Would anybody in the eighteenth century have taken this neat pale " set " for an inn ? I cannot think so ; nor that Mrs. Hardcastle, wandering in the dark, would not have easily recognized her whereabouts by the glimmering statue of Cupid an inch or two from her nose. But these are small matters. The jolly old play " comes across " in spite of Sir Nigel's refinement of taste. We are grateful to him for giving us another chance of enjoying it.
RICHARD jENNINGS.
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