THE MAID STORMS THE
, • FI , LYCEUM Wiwtir a wonderful woman Miss Thorndike is ! Her physical resilience is amazing. For three months she has been giving ten performances each week of a heavy production like Henry VIII ; she has produced The Cenci for four special performances as easily as going for a walk. She has innumerable other activities outside the theatre. One might have thought a holiday would have appealed to her. Not a bit of it. Here she' is again—in the middle, I believe, of rehearsing a new play by Miss Clemence Dane— with a six weeks' revival of-Mr. Shaw's masterpiece, which I foretell will pack the big Lyceum Theatre "to capacity" every evening. That in itself is a fine thing. A great play at last in a theatre with the great tradition of Irving and Dame Ellen Terry behind it. Mr. Shaw will appreciate the irony of that. Did he not help to make his name as the most sparkling dramatic critic that any London paper has ever been lucky enough to possess by his furious onslaughts on the Lyceum as a Victorian institution ?
Of Saint Joan, which has now been performed in almost every capital of importance in the civilized world, there is nothing new one can say. It will repay seeing again and again. With the possible exception of the first and last parts of Back to Methuselah it is incomparably Mr. Shaw's noblest achievement, and will live, I think, for the rest of time. Miss - Thorndike repeats her beautiful per- formance as The Maid and has, if possible, improved upon it. Many of the original company remain, notably Mr. Eugene Leahy as the Bishop of Be auvais, who dominates each scene in which he appears by sheer force of intellect. If there is a better piece of acting in London than this 'I shall be glad to know of it. Mr. Harold Scott replaces Mr. Thesiger. His Dauphin is curiously futile and pathetic and yet not without a certain wistful dignity. Mr. Thesiger, I thought (contrary to the general taste) burlesqued the part too much. Mr. Scott is more subtle, and gives; as .he never fails to do, a supremely good performance. I missed Mr. Milton Ibismer's genial, effeminate Bluebeard. Mi. Russell Thorndike could never have been a ladies' man ; 'hardly even an ordinary courtier. He was too malicious, too sinister. Mr. Hignett, as the Inquisitor, spoke his long argument on heresy with beautiful effect, but he was not always wholly midible, and lacked sornething of the 'gracious mellifluousness that Mr. 0. B. Clarence put into the same part. Mr. Fould's incidental
music improves vastly on closer acquaintance. • E. S. A.
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