"TAFFY" AT THE PRINCE OF WALES.
.SPECIAL MATINiE.
IT is easy to accuse Mr. Caradoc Evans of being rude to hig mother, but the metaphor is inapposite. His vilification of the South Welsh is the outcome of his love for Wales. He stirs up mud and slime, as it were, because he believes that the river needs dredging. Anyone who knows Wales will admit that
his attitude is greatly exaggerated, but the performance of his first play on Monday afternoon leaves no doubt as to his tremendous sincerity. Taffy is by no means faultless. It has all the raggedness and the limitations of Mr. Evans's stories, but it bites hard and deep into many foibles of the Welshman—sufficiently hard and deep to provoke the right- eous wrath of an assumedly Welsh section in the audience. Vigorous booing and hissing were quelled only by more Vigorous applause. Each act ended' in cacophany, and the triumphantly violent reception of Mr. Evans at the end of the play no doubt owed some of its energy to the false stimulus of rivalry.
In nothing is Mr. Evans more Welsh than in his predilection for highly coloured views on life and his tendency to take the most trivial events as tragique. Meanness, over-scrupulosity, narrowness,. self-seeking and prejudice are qualities not peculiar to Welshmen, and, although they are personified in certain of the characters in Taffy, the scathing invective of the play has the universal application of all good satire. Miss Edith Evans as Merged not only acted with her usual mastery, but on at least two occasions carried the play over dangerous technical lapses that less skilful acting would have exposed. Taffy calls for further performances, and, acted and produced as it was on Monday, it should have a
Previous page
