PUNCH, that curious British compromise be- tween humour and wit,
has recently gone and got itself a new look. In fact, 'post-Muggeridge Punch' is now a term at least as well known to the public as 'Proto-Sumerian' or 'Post- Jurassic,' and, not content with his success in print, the regalvanised gnome and his dog Toby have taken a plunge into the revue busi- ness. Unfortunately, they do not really plunge hard enough; if they had taken a header• off the deep end and used Punch contributors to do all the writing, they might have produced something approaching a new formula for satirical revue. As it is, the revue falls be- tween two stools: on the one hand, Vida Hope, its producer, seems to have felt the necessity of making at least a pass at the kind of item that is usually found on the revue stage; on the other, some of the turns (in par- ticular the recitation of Louis MacNeice's poem, 'Bagpipe Music) left the audience be- wildered. 'Bagpipe Music' is a good example. To understand and appreciate it it is necessary to know (1) that it is a poem written in the Thirties, and (2) what the mood was that then gave rise to this sort of poetry. These condi- tions were plainly not present on the night I went. Indeed, to be able to present evocations of this kind the theatre should be half the size, and the whole revue sternly intellectual. At the other end of the scale ordinary revue items such as the introduction and finale did not come off at all, largely through bad produc- tion. This was a pity, since one of the really catchy tunes was rather thrown away.
In its favour, Punch had a really luscious chorus, Binnie Hale, Paul Daneman and Alfie Bass. Miss Hale was, as aAvays, extremely funny, even when the text did not give her much help, and when she had something to get her teeth into, she was superb. Messrs. Daneman and Bass were responsible for the most successful sketch of the evening, 'One World,' while the chorus were a pleasure to watch whenever they appeared. However, it is by the writing of songs and sketches that a Punch revue must stand or fall, and it was here that it was disappointing. There were some first-class numbers ('Party Pieces' or 'If You Have Faith,' for example), but they were outnumbered by about two to one by the bad or indifferent, '1984' and 'Old Friends Are Best' should have been cut right out; coming together as they did, they were excruciating.
What is the moral? I don't know that there really is one. I am not certain even that an attempt of this nature is not doomed from the start. Some of the turns in this revue were more sharply satirical than anything I have seen on the London stage. All honour to them; a revue full of such satire would start a new genre, and some promise of this development was given us at the Duke of York's. But do the British public like really sharp satire in sufficient numbers to keep such a revue going? I have my doubts, but Punch will be doing us all a service if it tries to find out next year by relying wholeheartedly on its own satirical resources. The Merry Wives of Windsor is not one of my favourite Shakespearean plays. Still, there are laughs to be extracted from it, and Douglas Seale's new production extracts them very efficiently and with the same sure hand- ling of crowds that we saw in his production of the Henries. Here, as there, he is greatly helped by Paul Rogers's Falstaff, a 'good, fat man' if ever there was one. The fact that. with all these advantages, the play did not move as rapidly as could have been wished can probably be blamed on to Shakespeare.
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