THEATRE
THE last thing that I want to do is make easy fun of Mary Lumsden's sincere attempt to mix a little ophthalmology with such a love-story as may be found in any women's magazine or circulating library, but it is really very hard to put up with such utterances as " If corneas were easy to come by " and the monotonous frequency with which the characters pop " my darling " into their slab-like speeches. The play was said to have as its serious subject the corneal graft , operation—the technique by which the tsound cornea of a person alive or newly dead may be transferred to the diseased eye of the patient. Through the mouths of her personages Miss Lumsden discusses this at length, and we are duly shown an ophthalmologist peering into his patient's eye in a darkened room. Whether all this belongs to the stage is a matter of opinion. My own view is that this is less a play than a dramatised story of the sort popular with those who enjoy a quantity of informative documentary material as stuffing for their fiction. The fiction here concerns a woman who once cheated her sister out of the man they both loved (a famous ophthal- mologist, no less) so that she might marry him herself. When her sister is blinded, she is driven by remorse for that far-off trickery into offering one of her own comeas, and during the operation, performed by her husband, she dies. Her sister, however, can now see, and off she goes to marry—not the ophthalmologist but his assistant. The curtain falls as the ophthalmologist, chin up, pre- pares to face life bravely. It is not offensive ; it is not badly written : on the contrary, it is tactful and intelligent. It is also, however, monumentally dull as a play. It demands and receives—from Sebastian Shaw, Michael Gwynn, Janet Burnell, Anne Crawford, Eden Gray and others—careful playing on that dead-flat naturalistic level where the devils of boredom are busiest. In varying degree the actors do well what they have to do. Is it worth doing at all ? * * Paul Vincent Carroll's farce is a revised version of The Chuckiehead Story, which has already been seen outside London. Revised it may be, but it still has in too many parts the air of a rough draft, and some of the joints creak.alarmingly. The theme is admirable, and not by any means distantly removed from the facts of life as lived on the southern edge of the Republic of Ireland-Six Counties border. Chuckiehead thrives famously on smuggling, and that, one gathers, is as it should be, so long as the powers that be are witless enough to provide the opportunity. But Dublin determines to spoil the sport, and sends the humourless District. Justice Udolphus- McCluskey to round up the smugglers. The ensuing battle is at times extremely funny, but Mr. Carroll keeps putting a damper on it in two ways: first by an exuberant verbosity which frequently defeats its own end, and secondly by the sub-plot which demands that the king of the smugglers should go to jail in order to appease the red-headed heroine's desire to have a hero for husband. Still, there is .a good deal to amuse the connoisseur of Irishism (Mr. Carroll cannot keep good lines out of even his most indifferent plays), and there are fine performances in John Phillips' priggish District Justice and Liam Redmond's drunken-poetical police sergeant. lAnq HAMILTON.
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