CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THEATRE
The Millionairess. By George Bernard Shaw. (New.) IT is nasty not to join the party and sing oneself dizzy, but there it is. This late play of Shaw's seems to me one of the worst I have ever seen, and if it were performed by a company of the most diabolically clever actors imaginable, its silliness would be no less apparent. That being so, it strikes me that the revival and poshing up of the poor old thing as a vehicle for Miss Katharine Hepburn is essentially a matter of show biz, as they say, rather than of theatre. It is a comedy excruciatingly feeble in construction, character, situation and dialogue, and not worth five seconds' serious thought. Had it been the work of anyone other than Shaw, it might possibly have struggled with difficulty on to the remotest of stages. Is it not a pity that, simply because of Shaw's happening to live to a great age and to write after the consumption of his power, his lapses should be dug up to make the sort of entertainment more smartly provided by American comics in the music-hall ?
Let us look a little more closely. The Millionairess spends the greater part of her existence in the delivery of such deliciously witty abuse as " Greedy pig," " stingy beast," " blackguard " or, more extended, " You are a pig and a beast and a bolshevik," or, enormous fun, " You are an unmitigated hippopotamus." As characters she and the rest are dead from the neck down and only faintly animated above. For the pulling of gargoyle-faces and the m3notonous utterance of raucous pleasantries Miss Hepburn is gorgeously arrayed in a succession of up-to-the-minute gowns by a fashionable designer. The text is decrepit, so Miss Hepburn goes for it like a monumental cinema-organ letting it rip with a cracked air for the penny whistle. A considerable variety of gauche arabesque is added to complete the stunning procesi which (it is, presumably, hoped) has been more than three-quarters achieved by the dresses and the noise. All this in the context seems to me to be show biz ; so too, in my opinion, does Miss Hepburn's delivery, in the uneasily tremulous tones of a religious-minded Rotarian, of the one speech with a morsel of sentiment in it. I do not know whether or not Miss Hepburn is a gifted actress ; from films we know already that she has an oddly attractive face and a quaint voice ; from this entertainment one gathers also that her lungs are of considerable power and that she is game for the most fearsome of knockabout. I learned that, and, apparently unlike the quivering rhapsodists who could scarcely restrain themselves from applauding throughout the entire performance, I learned no more. The cynicism (as I see it) of the production is formidable. It might have Put a slightly different and more amusing, because more honest, complexion on it 'if Tennent Productions had gone the whole hog and come to an arrangement, to have the piece done at the Palladium.
'AIN HAMILTON.
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