THEATRE
MR. RODNEY ACKLAND'S adaptation of Hugh Walpole's novel must always have seemed a rather protracted and fidgety melodrama (1 seem to be alone among professional playgoers in not having seen it before) which could be put through only by firm direction and meticulously tuned acting. This latest revival has quality but falls short of the necessary measure. Miss Barbara Everest is most successful, hitting off the kindly, sentimental Lucy Amorest with a moving piece of acting, and Miss Marjory Hawtrey keeps the twitter- ing old maid who owns that unfortunate chunk of amethyst as nearly on the rails as the author allows. But the piece depends ultimately on Agatha Payne, that feline gypsy of a woman whose lust for "beauty" leads her to theft and murder. In Miss Freda Jackson's Performance, given ruthlessly against the style of the other two, underplayed melodrama and overplayed realism fight it out and leave a caricature instead of a character on the stage. An Agatha Payne without credibility spells death to the play, for the frightened old ladies have nothing to fear; the devil is bogus. And Mr. Anthony Hawtrey has assisted at the demise with a production which not only allows this, but underlines it with a speed of performance, Particularly at the critical moments, which is almost funereal.
As the title carefully and clearly indicates, the new play at the Princes is about the seduction of a girl not yet sixteen. Our sympathy h asked, however, not for the girl but for the young man involved, on the assorted grounds that " he was not the first," was not the progenitor of her expected baby, did not know the precise age of the silly painted creature, was subjected by her crudely obvious mother to an attempt at blackmail, and has since fallen in love with a girl so fundamentally n ce " that she has successfully resisted his efforts to seduce her.
With such a muddleheaded plot line the play inevitably becomes ineffectual. Everything has got the wrong way round, so that it seems at the -end that. the play is entering a special plea for the encouragement of young men to seduce girls of sixteen or over, or alternatively for the seduction of girls beneath that age to be
legalised forthwith. Which is absurd—or I hope so. Matching the ineptness of plot and situations is a banality of dialogue which leaves even those practised actors, Miss Mary Merrall and Mr. Esmond Knight, as the nice girl's parents, floundering like whales in the Serpentine, and just as surprised to be there.
Whilst that insulting anachronism, the Lord Chamberlain's censor- ship of the drama, survives, I can see no reason why its functions should not be entrusted to someone able to discriminate between a good play on a difficult subject with a serious purpose and a bad one
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