THE THEATRE
'Lady Windermere's Fan." At the Haymarket. —" Sigh No More." At the Piccadilly.
Lady Windermere's Fan was the first and it is the worst of Oscar Wilde's comedies. It has a thoroughly artificial and conventional plot which does not so much strain belief as be beyond the bounds of it, so that the elaborately contrived situation with which the second act opens requires, in order to produce any dramatic effect, a degree of ignorant credulity no present-day audience is capable of. This neat, transparent theatricality would not matter so decisively if the wit were better, but here the brilliant author of The Importance of Being Earnest was much below his best level. All the people in the play are dummies without a breath of life, and we never forget for one moment during the play that Lady Windermere is really Miss Dorothy Hyson—exceedingly pretty, gracious, charming and beautifully dressed. The brilliant personality of Miss Atfiene Seyler in another of Mr. Cecil Beaton's dazzling costumes puts Wilde's duchess completely out of our minds,- and Miss Isabel Jeans can find no scrap of substance in Wilde's more than usually hollow dialogue to make one think for one instant that she is Lady Windermere's mother. Compelled, therefore, to watch a number of our well-known and gifted actors move through a sort of feeble undergraduate charade our only enjoyment is in the supreme elegance with which they take their well-bred way through Mr. Beaton's delightfully sumptuous decorations.
The inequalities of Oscar Wilde have the semblance of a level plain beside those of Mr. Noel Coward. His new revue, Sigh No More, is a shocking disappointment. The gay, impudent but amus- ing flippancy of the pre-war Noel Coward has evaporated into a sort of feeble dispirited meiosis that would disgrace Punch. It is hardly credible that the author of that truly brilliant comedy, Blithe Spirit, and of so many bright sketches and skits could have concocted this tiresome and unenlivening revue in which dull num- ber succeeds dull number with merciless assurance. It is not often that actors can be seen in such labour, but it may be admitted that Joyce Grenfell in This is the End of the News, which is item nine in the eleven numbers before the interval, brings the first sparkle of vivacity into the theatre. Otherwise Mr. Coward seems to be raising a monument to middle age and its disillusions, but in spite of the talent of Mr. Cyril Ritchard, Miss Madge Elliott and others, his monument evokes similar feelings to those which must stir in a veteran of the Boer War with nowhere to go who finds him- self facing the Albert Memorial in Hyde Park, where he played as a child, on a wet Saturday afternoon in December.
JAMES REDFERN.
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