... Round the New Shows At the Theatre Come Out of Your Shell (Criterion; 8.30) I DO not remember having seen before a revue at the Criterion. But this like the servant-girl's baby, is only a little one. That is to say, it is very intimate, it has no chorus, the scenic arrangements are simplicity itself, and instead of an orchestra we have a pianist and a drummer. In the first half there was ...

... Playbill Looks at the Shows Escort (Lyric) SIR PATRICK HASTINGS'S drama of the Royal Navy in wartime, Escort, is by no means plain sailing. No doubt that is as it should be, for purposes of realism. But Sir Patrick has complicated matters owing to a professional urge to graft police-court cross-examina tion stuff on to ward-room routine. The other play of the dangers of life at sea these ...

... (A Hui By James Agate Which Eve BE sure oi this, reader, that when the cinema says Eve it means the Eve not of Mr. Shaw but of Mr. Shakespeare. Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives. I will be more jealous of thee than a Barbary cock- pigeon over his hen, more clamorous than a parrot against rain, more new-fangled than an ape, more giddy in my desires than ...

... By Herbert Farjeon Sadler's Wells Ballet (New Theatre) IN these barbaric days (or are there still people who maintain that the world progresses?), a little culture is a great consolation. If humanity must fight for its life when the guns get going, so, no less tenaciously, must art. And in a country that regards it as a wanton waste of money to spend one governmental penny on the theatre in ...

... ''Peer Gynt (New) By Horace Horsnell MASTERPIECES of art that, for one reason or another, are not quite themselves present teasing problems. The world is littered with them. They range from the surviving fragments of Sappho's verse to the battered grimace of the tourist-haunted Sphinx. Here we have Ibsen's Peer Gynt, a dramatic fantasy written in 1867. This long episodic poem comes to us ...

... Sweet Yesterday (Adelplii) A MUSICAL romance does well to be shame lessly romantic. Nobody will complain because the hero of this piece not only delivers French Royalists from Napoleon's prisons after the manner of the Scarlet Pim pernel in the days of the Revolution, but is also the spy who made Trafalgar possible and has himself an affair of the heart which brings him in fine operatic style ...

... COTTAGE TO LET AT WYNDHAM'S THEATRE By ANTHONY COOKMAN IT is entirely reasonable to fight shy of topical plays. Like Coronation pic tures or Jubilee marches or Corn Law rhymes, they are apt to be bad art, so disconcertingly reluctant is art to come pat to any given occasion. But there is no need on this account to think twice before going to see Cottage To Let. at Wyndham's Theatre. True, it ...

... By Horace Horsnell Lifeline (Duchess) A LARGE but possibly dwindling section of the community regards that loyal plant, the aspidistra, less as a botanical phenom enon than as a household pet or member of the family. And even the callous æsthete, who sees in its unassuming tenure of the parlour window merely a target for his wit, must confess that it has virtues. Cheerfulness in discouraging ...

... By Herbert Farjeon Jupiter Laughs (New) THE action of Dr. Cronin's play (a very workmanlike affair) takes place in a private nerve clinic, the particular locale chosen being the doctor's common-room, which happily spares us the patients. Here we are introduced to Dr. Drewett, an amiable old hand much engrossed in playing patience, and to Dr. Thorogood, an unamiable young one, much engrossed in ...

... THE CINEMA By JAMES AGATE Penny Plain, Twopence Technicolored IT is remarkable how the rich never seem to get tired of pointing out the acute disadvantages of wealth. Especially film producers, who are all fabulously wealthy! Of the three or four elementary parables which comprise the film industry's entire repertory of plots, the one illustrating the extreme anguish of living on more than a ...

... TlCL. Two Good Things: By James Agate IF there is one film of which I am more tired than of any other it is that dreary exposition of how two people can be in love with one another without knowing it. Shakespeare began it with Beatrice and Benedick, and it looks like going on for ever. I can understand young people putting up with all these linked acerbities long drawn out, as Milton so nearly ...

... TU By Horace Horsnell Old Chelsea (Prince's) I OLD times, sentimentally approached, are apt to display ye olde veneer; and there are writers whose quality may be judged by their attitude to the past. This may be patronising, which is bad; snobbish, which is worse, or just plumb whimsical, which but it is late in the day to flog that poor lade, the musical-comedy libretto. Good ness knows ...