" Bred in the Bone." By Michael Egan. (Lyric, Hammersmith.)
MR. EGAN'S comedy—though whether it is meant to be a comedy or a problem play seems a little doubtful—has come to Hammersmith from Cambridge. It may find its way to the West End—or it may not—for Mr. Egan is either not quite sure what he is driving at or has failed• to make it clear. The problem is the old one of heredity and environment, reason and feeling, but which comes out on top in the end I for one failed to divine. Ailsa Fergus, told on the occasion of her engagement that she is not the child of her supposed parents but was adopted as a baby, receives the information with remarkable equanimity, proceeds to hunt out her real mother, discovers her married to a drunken bully in a Stepney basement, decides, after a good deal of entertaining dialogue, to invite the whole family to tea at her adoptive parents' home in Hampstead— an opportunity for plenty of fairish farce here—and after insisting to her fiancé that she must take two or three of her new-found relatives into the home she is about to set up, abandons the plan just as the fiancé is abandoning his objections to it ; and the curtain comes down on them inconclusively but agreeably enlaced by each other's arms. Altogether the acting is better than the plot. Miss Kathleen Michael, as the adopted Ailsa, carries most of the piece on her shoulders, and Miss Ballantyne as the supposed mother and Miss Gladys Henson as the real mother play their entrusted parts
Previous page
