... The Glass Slipper (St. James's) By Horace Horsnell IT cannot have been merely to avoid con fusion with other seasonable Cinderellas that Herbert and Eleanor Farjeon call their fairy-tale with music by its alternative title, The Glass Slipper. One feels that it was rather to mark differences than to disclaim kinship. The differences are fundamental. Their version amounts to a restoration, a ...

... TU By Herbert Farjeon The Blue Goose (Comedy) IF you want to get the feeling that there isn't a war on and that life in 1941 is pro ceeding just as evenly and calmly as it did (or did it?) ten years ago, a visit to the Comedy Theatre may possibly supply your need. Not that life as depicted in The Blue Goose is appreciably more like life in 1931 than it is now. It isn't. It doesn't nretend to ...

... REVIEWED BY ELIZABETH BOWEN FOR most of us, Germany is a nightmare subject. Instinctively the mind bends back from the picture of devastation, from the unanswered and perhaps unanswerable questions of this defeat. We do not like the odours from the abyss. Germany had it coming to her: well, it has come now. I suppose it would have been impossible, three or four years ago, halfway through the ...

... By Horace Horsnell Rain (St. Martin's) MR. SOMERSET MAUGHAM has a remark able gift for investing fiction with an air of truth. He exercises it, not only in his choice of themes, but in his treatment of them. His best stories seem so credible, their characters so real, that simple readers are persuaded he takes them direct from life. And since his point of view is seldom a soothing one, it is ...

... ELIZABETH BOWEA „g BOOKS A Star Danced 44 flow Small a Part of Time 44 Merchant Airmen 44 44 With a Bare Bodkin 44 Leading Lady A STAR DANCED (W. H. Allen; 10s. 6d.) is Gertrude Lawrence's autobiography. Like everything else she has done, it is distinctive-- even in form, for it darts to and fro in time. We don't begin, for instance, with I was born. We begin with her dash back, by air, ...

... The Banbury Nose (Wyndham's) By Horace Horsnell MR. Peter Ustinov must be getting tired of being told that he is a promising dramatist; but he is promising, if only in the sense that each new play he writes creates lively expectations of the next. He is young, though there is nothing callow about his work. Indeed, the striking thing about it is its maturity. l ne nesuauons or mcxpcncuuc of ...

... By Horace Horsnell Humply Duinpty (Coliseum) Cinderella (His Majesty's) PANTOMIME, like Punch, has never been what it was. The trouble is that, unlike Shakespeare and the Musical Brasses, it is not an acquired taste. Seen in youth, it is usually a case of love at first sight. Once an absolute monarch, as ribald as rollicking, King Panto has become a kind of constitutional cypher, and, like ...

... Emily, Duchess of Leinster Hrud of u Traveller Death Be Mot Proud In the East My Pleasure Elizabeth Bewen's EMILY DUCHESS OF LEINSTER, 1731-1814: A Study of Her Life and Times (Staples Press; 15s.) is the work of Brian Fitz- Gerald, one of the lady's descendants. Mr. FitzGerald, as author, is at a further advantage: in addition to knowing the background of which he writes, he is in the ...

... (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 ...

... A Doll's House (Winter Garden) YES, another revival, but the more revivals that are forced upon us the more certain are we of one thing-- that storytelling will carry the preaching long after the preach ing has grown musty. (It would be by no means surprising if Pinero, who was on intimate terms with a vanished society, should one day catch the ear of an entirely different set of people ...

... At The Theatre IS itli Bliitton Shoes'* (London Hippodrome) Audi onr ('ookinuii To drag in comparisons with Oklahoma! and Annie Get Your Gun is not quite fair. These pieces were revolutionary in the sense that both had something definite to say and said it in a way that seemed delight fully fresh because the music and the dancing and the humour were all to the point. They hinted at the ...