CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THE THEATRE
The Chiltern Hundreds." By Douglas Home. (Vaudeville.) OFF and on during the performance of The Chiltern Hundreds I kept thinking of the brilliant triviality of Oscar Wild; rather to Mr. Home's disadvantage and perhaps unfairly. This play is trivial, but not excessively brilliant. It might have been written by a Wilde who had grown tired of his own epigrams and wanted to get a play about politics off his hands as quickly as possible. One felt that the whole thing should be dated—and yet it was not. That it appeared fresh was almost entirely the work of the amazing Mr. A. E. Matthews, who at a real age of something near eighty appeared to be impersonating a very sprightly middle-aged senility.
Within the limits he set himself by choosing stock characters Mr. Home did not fail. He was particularly successful in devising little things for Mr. Matthews to do in his drolly doddering way— shooting rabbits from the dining-room window of Lister Castle, tottering around with the basin on his way o feed the ducks, explaining to his butler the mechanics of a simple snare or insisting on having his sausages taken back to the kitchen and cooked on both sides. Mr. Michael Shepley had a good part as the portentously Conservative butler, and carried it out well enough to get away with the old trick of piling up the syllables. Mr. Macaulay, however, who played the part of the Labour M.P. promoted to Cabinet rank, was too much like a real, hard-headed go-gettpr to fit very happily into a play which was most successful when Mr. Matthews was persuading us of the utter significance of the completely trivial. The plot of the play and its slender love-interest, are as important as the Chiltern Hundreds in British politics. H. D.
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