THE THEATRE.
" ADVERTISING APRIL; OR, THE GIRL WHO MADE THE SUNSHINE JEALOUS," BY HER- BERT FARJEON AND HORACE HORSNELL, AT THE CRITERION THEATRE.
Advertising April is a very amusing play wrongly described in its printed version as a comedy. It is a farce, but one which makes use of none of the usual well-worn machinery of farces. Almost any French farce would have been understood by Tutankhamen and will be comprehensible two thousand years hence. Advertising April is only of the present.
Now, it is sometimes brought up as a criticism of a piece of artistic work that it is not "for all time." But unques- tionably the topical piece of work comes home more forcibly to its contemporaries than does the central and eternal. The gods are just. If you renounce past and future the present will be given you nore abundantly : this is a play which makes fun of very real current absurdities.
April Mawne is a film star, and her publicity is ably managed by her Press agent and husband, Mr. Edmund Hobart, an opportunist and a stupid but amusing vulgarian, whose methods are entertainingly satirized. In the throes of a struggle with a rival film star, known as "The Gasper," Hobart, with the notion of a genuine divorce between himself and the star, goes beyond even April's appetite for notoriety. In the end a reconciliation takes place. This is the outer skin of the plot.
The main idea is that the leopard cannot change his spots. Once a "people's darling" always a people's darling. It is RO good for a young poet to fight his way through a forest of cameras and Press cuttings and try to make an artist out of a star—and very well and humorously this idea is set forth, without heaviness or pomposity.
Miss Sybil Thorndike is April, and in the second and third acts was delightful, though I have rather a quarrel with her reading of the part. After all, the young poet, with his talk about bathing by moonlight in a forest pool, is a much worse sham than she is. April Mawne should have been made, I feel, a "gamin," a true vulgar child ofNature, very young and always generously assuming that tinsel paper is gold. She should also have had a slight Brixton accent (I mean the sort that will not pass the test of "Mr. Lowndes has thousands and thousands of brown hounds "). Our sympathies should have been with her as against both the men, one with his rather tiresome and robustious romantic aestheticism, and the other with his grotesque commercial opportunism.
Miss Margaret Yarde, as Mrs. Trimmer, the large, comfortable dresser, was admirable. She is an actress who plays this sort of role to perfection—every movement of her sewing hands or wisely nodded head is a pleasure. Mr. Lawrence Anderson was good as the young poet, the only badly observed char- acter in the piece. The young poet of the present day is not like that, except that he does frequently wear grey flannel trousers summer and winter.
Miss Sybil Thorndike has the Criterion Theatre for only five weeks, but I cannot help thinking that so extremely amusing, so entirely topical, vivacious, and well acted a play will demand a much longer run than this. I sincerely hope so as I should like to see it again. TARN.
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