A New Children's Play
Exciting without being frightening, charming without being arch and original without being disconcertingly. so. Listen To The Wind, which I saw at the Oxford Playhouse over tho weekend, is a very good play for children. Written by Miss Angela Ainley Jeans with music and lyrics by Mr. Vivian Ellis, it stands (I am told) a good chance of promotion to the West End next Christmas. A children's play which establisheS Itself as a hardy annual must be a very pleasant, as well as a fairly valuable, form of literary property. Success in this genre seems to be the nearest thing the theatre offers to guarantee of immortality. Your work, punctually and almost automatically revived, is never submitted to an agonising reappraisal as one generation of dramatic critics succeeds another. Ibsen may date, but Where the Rainbow Ends doesn't. Every audience you please produces in time, by .11 process of rotation impervious to changes in fashion or in taste, another audience; and there really seems, as far as ono can see, no reason why your play should not go on giving pleasure for ever and ever.
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