* * * * Londoners who stay away from the
Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park can have small conception of what they are missing. I have thought that before and I thought it more than ever as I sat and watched the first performance (this season) of As You Like It on Tuesday. None of all Shakespeare's plays, not even A Midsummer Night's Dream, fits the setting quite as well as this, but almost any play by any writer would be rated at some- thing more than its merits by an audience ranged on the greensward in comfortable deck chairs as daylight fades and the trees and shrubs that make the background for the players stand out under skilful illumination against the thickening darkness. This particular per- forma ace, let me not fail to add, would have won high praise even on the stage of an overheated London theatre; as it was the Forest of Arden was not merely simulated but reproduced. And on whose ears could the question " Who stays Time still withal ? " and the answer, " with lawyers in the vacation : for they sleep between term and term and then they perceive not how Time moves," have more appropriately fallen than those of the Lord Chan, cellor (who, as the Lord Chief Justice so 'accurately observed on Monday, is rarely referred to as Duggie Hogg) as he sat listening in a front row with the Chinese Ambassador, the Austrian Minister and other well- known figures close by ?
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