THE THEATRE
"Under One Roof." By Kim Peacock. At the St. Martin's--., Black Vanities." At the Victoria Palace.
UNDER one roof " in a growing town less than zo miles from London " live a drunken and quarrelsome father, an unhappy mother, a son who has been sent down from Oxford as a result of the more agreeable vices, and a daughter who, because of an unhappy love for a young clergyman, a believer in celibacy, gets herself with child by a married man. Two other daughters escape from these close quarters by marriage early in the play. It will be seen from this brief and unsympathetic résumé— rather on the lines of our older critics—that Mr. Peacock's play contains a whole Molotoff bread-basket of incendiary situations. What opportunity for the pompous, the pathetic, the emotional cliche! but Mr. Peacock, like an expert fire-fighter, extinguishes every bomb in turn before it has time to start a fire. From the moment the curtain rises on the little poky suburban bedroom and on the fat oldest daughter struggling into her wedding shift, Mr. Peacock manages the old situations with the utmost fresh- ness : his lines are witty and savage, his minor twists are as unexpected as his major ones are conventional, and above all he refuses to take even his savagery seriously and ties everything up in the last scene with a Dickensian sentiment that has the effect of a shoulder-shrug. Mr. Agate may not have liked this play, but the audience unquestionably did. Miss Maire O'Neill, Miss Dorothy Hyson, Mr. David Home, and Miss Mercia Swinburne all acted well, but the real honours fell to Miss Molly Hamley-Clifford as the monstrous Auntie Dee, with an appetite for food as insatiable as her brother's for drink, and a bosbm like. a map of the world spread out on a classroom-wall. To watch that huge unwelcome guest arrive for the wedding in jet and ospreys, or trot twittering delightedly off at the first suggestion of breakfast, is alone worth a visit to the St. Martin's.
Our older critics who found nothing worth praise- in Mr. Peacock's intelligent play found Black Vanities more to their taste. How odd these variations of taste are ! I should have said that Mr. Black had used up all his best material in Apple Sauce ! and left us with something very dim indeed, and that the dresses and decor are among the worst to be seen on the London stage, all sequins and poison-bottle slinky greens, when they are not timid Quality Street settings of pale blues and cherry ribbons (" life is just a bowl of cherries," one song mysteriously told us). There are, of course, Flanagan and Miss Frances Day . . . that graceless face under the battered crownless straw, those dirty ducks sagging below slack braces are the perfect foil for beauty —the thin Venetian glass figure, the Undine smile, the long brittle fingers tossing a flower to an officer in a box, something for the troops to dream about as she sings " Silver Wings."
" He with his wings on his tunic, Me with my heart on my sleeve."
GRAHAM GREENE.
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