CHRISTMAS ENTERTAINMENTS .
To keep under control any critical sourness, one had better begin by praising something. In a broadcast talk Mr. Macqueen-Pope made an eager plea for the restoration of Harlequin. I drowned his per- suasive voice with a mild cheer, made a gesture of salute towards Broadcasting House, and thought sadly of Christmas " entertain- ments " still to see. An oppressive moment ; but Mr. Macqueen- Pope on the magical properties of the harlequinade turned my 'thoughts happily towards the diversion in that genre offered by the Players' Theatre and preceded by the fairy extravaganza entitled .Riquet with the Tuft. It is tiresome to be advised that the most amusing of the pantomimes should be performed in a club theatre and so inaccessible to the public, but there it is. In 1836 J. R. Planchd took the French fairy-tale, a variation on the theme of Beauty and the Beast, and built on it " a grand comical, allegorical, magical, musical burlesque burletta." In 1951 Miss Hattie Jacques and Miss Joan Sterndale Bennett sought out the " burletta," rendered it down, and smartened it up for the small stage of the Players. It is innocent neither of wit nor of humour ; the weariest of business-men might be refreshed by its unsickly sentiment, the most horrid infant silenced by its magic. A musical-box rather than a steam-organ, it is anything but " entertainment " in the grubby and aggressive sense of that unfortunate word. These delightful revels are deliciously led by Daphne Anderson and Stephen Blake, with Hattie Jacques amply impressive as the Fairy Queen and Joan Sterndale Bennett as her wonderfully palliated assistant. .
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is another fairy-tale told to the theatre-going children this season. This is at the-St. James's, an oddish home for the stage version of a film by Walt Disney. Since I dropped off now and then among the twenty-five scenes, I shall content myself with the observation that those of the young and innocent eye were brimming with the charity that ran so low in me. But I hasten to say that I took to Kay Osborne as the Princess just as quickly as the children.
The children also took to Joan Greenwood as Peter Pan, at the Scala, but do they believe in fairies quite so frantically as they used to ? Perhaps it was only that Miss Greenwood, at that moment when Tinker Bell is in such a bad way, did not quite believe in them herself. For ,myself, I ceased altogether to believe in pirates after the feeble fight, a most perfunctory and unbloody brawl, that the shipboard scene offered.
The three gigantic pantomimes run true to form—lavish, efficient mixter-maxters, bright, breezy and bouncy. _In Aladdin, at the Casino, Nat Jackley is a willowy Widow Twankey, no tough and sour-tongued laundress she, and amuses greatly ; a group of tumblers, the Olanders, provide a breathtaking whirligig of a scene. I was not myself at the two other big pantomimes Humpty Dunipty at the Palladium and Cinderella at the Princes—but I briefly pass on the highly favourable reports of juvenile spies, Then there are the two ice shows—Puss in Boots at the Empress Hall and Robinson Crusoe at the Empire Pool, Wembley—outshining in spectacle and splendid improbability their stagebound rivals. The Bertram Mills circus at Olympia and Tom Arnold's at Harringay Arena are well up to expected standard, but in the case of Arnold's the blown-out barn of a place in which it is presented is sadly destructive of circus atmosphere. The distance between spectator and ring lends inevitable
Previous page
