... The Theatre By Herbert Farjeon IPar, Revues, and The Playboy t Duchess i AFTER a period of considerable anxiety and inactivity, the West End theatres are gaining heart and scope once more, and managers who have managed to carry on are making hay not only while the moon shines, but even while it doesn't. The population of London may be smaller than it was, but the percentage of playgoers may ...

... By V. S. Pritchett Once you get a taste for it, Anglo Ireland is an irresistible subject. Of course, one means Anglo-Ireland of the landlords; outside of that there was a sub-Bournemouth gentility, and Mr. Bernard Shaw's horror of the middle classes was really based, not on the museum pieces of Kensington, but on the fossils of Kilkenny. In the Irish eight eenth century the riff-raff of an ...

... By V. S. Pritchett IN the last twenty years there have been many attempts at a Victorian revival, but it must be admitted that the Victorians wilt again very quickly. They are defended but not admired; our real admiration, and one for which we shall, quite rightly, be duly damned, is still the eighteenth century. It is the easier subject. As Mr. Peter Quennell says in his urbane and witty ...

... : Reviewed by Noel Thompson TWO books this month have their setting for the most part on board ship. The first is Life Boat by Signe Toksvig (Faber and Faber, 7s. 6d.), and a very unusual book this is. The plot is that of the American wife of a German husband on their way back to Germany. The husband's former governess is on board, now a missionary, and terribly wounded about the face by the ...

... The Theatre By Herbert Farjeon In Good King Charles's Golden Days New MR. BERNARD SHAW'S play on King Charles the Second, described on the programme as A History Lesson in Three Scenes, is immeasurably more entertaining and instructive than most of the history lessons in our schools. That, of course, goes without saying. The choice of characters and period enables the author to discuss all ...

... By V. S. Pritchett MR. CHARLES MORGAN has a place of his own in contemporary fiction. It is not at the top. He is not one of the good good novelists nor one of the good bad novelists. He belongs to that curious mixed company of the bad good, the faux bon. I dreamt that I dwe-elt in ma-arble halls describes the sensation his books give to one. One wakes up in one of those literary nails ot ...

... Films of tlie Day Advance Notes on an Epic By George Campbell AN American spy on whom I rely for information now and then has been trying to dig up some information about The Great Dictator. After putting an official of United Artists' Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Culture to the question, my informant succeeded in breaking through the veil of secrecy with which Chaplin surrounds his ...

... The Theatre By Herbert Farjeon Lunchlime Shakespeare Strand IT may be said that the theatre these days is getting along like one o'clock-- though why one should get along faster or slower than any other hour, nobody has ever been able to explain to me. One, however, is now unquestion ably the popular entertainment time, possibly because, in addition to its status as an interval, raid or no ...

... Enterprise in Bayswater The Scarlet Pimpernel (Threshold Matinees only) DRAMA, for the moment, just does not exist in the West End, but the plucky little Threshold Theatre, down Bays water way, has come to the fore with a more than adequate revival of that hoary favourite, The Scarlet Pimpernel. The choice strikes me as odd, for this tale of the French Revolu tion, which brings back memories ...

... Playbill Looks at the Shows What Every Woman Knows (Lyric). THIS is the second of the wartime Barrie revivals (apart from Peter Pan), and although it dates a bit-- it is thirty-five years old-- it is, I think, a better play than Dear Brutus. It is. more direct, it has more humour, and it is free from the more whimsical type of sentimen tality. True, it takes a long time to get to the ...

... Round the New Shows At the Theatre The Chocolate Soldier (Shaftesbury) IT is not necessary to go back as far as 1910 (the year of the original production) for a comparison with last week's revival of The Chocolate Soldier, at the Shaftesbury. It was given not many years since at this very theatre. Both these previous productions dif fered from the present one in that they were musical ...

... I WANT an old Etonian, said a rather snooty young lovely at the St. Regis bar. At your service! cried a dashing Guards officer clicking his heels. An old Etonian, she said, somewhat icily, is two-thirds gin, one-third Lillet, and a dash of dark Crime Noyeau. That 's exactly what I am, replied the indomitable one. She relented. Maybe c'est la guerre, maybe c'est that demoralising ...