STAGE AND SCREEN The Theatre
"Home and Beauty." By A. P. Herbert. At the Ade1phi IF fault could be found with Mr. Cochran's Coronation Revue it would be because it had too much stately Home and not enough stately Beauty. The scene throughout is Mulberry Moat, a patrician mansion that is in our time but not of it. It swarms with staff in the manner of Miss Sackville-West's 'Edwardian novel, but in today's manner its week-end doors are thrown wide open to all the artistic riff-raff that the sons and daughters of the Earl and Countess of Mulberry see fit to invite. .
The result of Mr. Herbert's basic plan is homogeneity. But who wants a thing like that in a Cochran revue ? We are given scenes in hall and corridors, dressing-rooms and bath- room, bedrooms and dining-room, kitchen and nursery, music- :room and library. But these interiors can hardly make us forget Mr. Cochran's many previous personally conducted trips round the more colourful portions of the habitable globe, even if, for this occasion, we had been restricted in our tour to the British Empire I
The two pieces of spectacle vouchsafed are a pageant of English princes and potentates, and a glimpse from a music- room window in a misty, Palladian-cum-Surrealiste setting that implies a " wet, bird-haunted English lawn " in the background. These are lovely while they last.
Stranger and stranger, there is hardly any dancing and very little chorus-work. One scene particularly points the absence of charm and the determination to have wit at all costs. This is a bridge-party in the library, and the players sing their bids to strains of genuine Handel that proves too good to be japed. We are reminded of the many occasions when Mr. Cochran has seriously regaled us with such worthy old musk, and in consequence the episode falls flatter than anything else in the show.
It must not be assumed that Home and Beauty falls flat as a whole, or that the note is so much of disappointment as of a kind of deliberate and satirical fobbing-off. There arc at leait two volatile spirits in the cast to keep things moving in their limited orbit, and all the time there is Mr. Herbert's wit which is neat and at its prettiest when he is indulging in timely tilts at the follies of beauty-culturists. Miss Binnie Hale and Mr. Nelson Keys undoubtedly make up the life, just as Miss Gitta Alper may be said to constitute the soul of the show. But soul, as has already been implied, is a little to seek, and not all of Miss Alpar's eager vocalising can deafen us to the inadequate quality of her music. The scenes between Miss Hale and Miss Alper, presenting two deadly professional rivals in the matter of coloratura, are wholly delightful, since the former plays throughout with malice and mockery, whereas the newcomer seems yet to have to learn these words and these qualities.
In the last half-hour Miss Hale and Mr. Keys, who have been giving bewilderingly clever impersonations of types throughout the evening, turn to the impersonation of long- established stage-favourites. Unkindness could go no further, and it will be well if the matinees at the Adelphi coincide with those of certain other theatres lest the models be brought to see these merciless portraits.
The other contritutors to the evening's verve are so numerous that one might easily overlook the name of Mr. Van Phillips, the orchestrator, who has wittily decked out the sufficient little tunes of Messrs. Nikolaus Brodszky and Henry Sullivan, and wisely left Handel's tender wood-winds to speak for themselves. Mr. Leslie French sings well and without affectation, Miss Septa Treble looking sweetly at him while he does so, and Miss Norah Howard's clear and telling enunciation as Lady Mulberry does the most justice to the book's felicities. By way of divertissement there is the piano-duetting of Messrs. Rawicz and Landauer, who are expert in the most aqueous arpeggi and the swiftest chro- matic scales. But why must the programme of a Corona- than Revue, with an intense and avowed " For England " Motif, be sprinkled so liberally with such names ? It remains to say that the handsomest of the costumes have been designed by M. Raoul Pene Dubois and executed by Mme.
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