STAGE AND SCREEN The Theatre
"Three Men on a Horse." By John Cecil Holm and George Abbot. At Wyndham's THERE are three ingredients in the entertainment offered at Wyndham's. The first, and happily the most important, is a farce brilliantly conceived. The second is a farce groomed (as they say of film stars) into popular shape by one of those expert play-doctors who in New York act as pimp-cum-mid- wife to the Muse of Drama. The third is an American cast which might. conceivably make Broadway but would not stay there long.
Erwin -Trowbridge, whose pedigree is by Strube out of The Diary of a Nobody, is a pathetic, lovable denizen of Ozone Heights, N.J. By profession a writer of greeting- cards—in England equalled in their saccharine banality only. by cracker mottoes—he is by vocation a tipster. Give him a racing edition and a pencil, and he supplies the second sight ; he picks a winner as easily and in- variably as a female novelist's hero selects a cigarette. But he never bets ; horses to him are the most academic of hobbies, and he has no more to do with punting than a crossword- puzzle addict has to do with lexicography. But a tiff with his wife drives him ephemerally to drink, and he recovers his senses to find that he has fallen in with a third-rate bunch of crooks whose fortunes depend on horses that they never see and who have already made some profit from his prophecies. Naturally they are anxious to make more, and the mild Erwin. becomes to them all and more that the Empress of Blandings was to Lord Emsworth, that Pu Yi is to the Japanese. The consequences are inevitably comic.
The farce misses in execution the greatness which it has in conception. The dialogue is slick, the situations are handled with unfailing competence ; but beside the shadow of Chaplin, which Erwin constantly evokes, the texture of the farce seems shoddy and uninspired. It is, however, excellent entertainment. Mr. Romney Brent, though his range as a comedian is limited, makes Erwin an appealing worm. Mr. Bernard Nedell domineers incisively as the leading crook, but the part needed more boorish, more Bowery treatment. The best performance comes. from Miss Claire Carleton as a cutie ; the worst from either Mr. William Butler Hixson or Mr. Maurice Freeman. They run each other pretty close.
PETER FLEMING.
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