... By Horace Horsnell The Petrified Forest (Globe) ROBERT SHERWOOD'S drama of the Arizona desert (as filmgoers will remember) is less stony than its title suggests. Though its scene and most of its characters are primi tive, there is nothing prehistoric about the plot. The petrified forest is a local landmark, and only remotely symbolic. Dreams, they tell us, are fraught with symbolism, but ...

... By Horace Horsnell It Happened in September (St. James's) BUT not, one feels, quite in this way. The dramatist who bases the action of his play on topical history is liable to give hostages to realism. Particularly when that topical history has to carry and colour a personal story. Such dramatic surprises as the action must spring will depend less on those basic events, since they are common ...

... By Herbert Farjeon Goodnight Children (Netvj As a butt for his latest play Mr. J. B. Priestley has invented an organisation which he has named the English Broadcasting Company, known as the E.B.C., and which, we are warned on the programme, is not to be confused with the British Broad casting Corporation, known as the B.B.C. This, I must confess, was, in my own case, more easily read than ...

... MYSELF AT THE PICTURES Who Reads Film Criticism By James Agate WHY have our highbrow critics failed to perceive that the entire charm of the cinema lies in its quality of being ephemeral? Sit through a serious play in the theatre, and you will undergo an experience which lasts. Certainly until you get home, sometimes all next day, and sometimes for the rest of your life. I can think of pieces ...

... By Horace Horsnell Macbeth (Piccadilly) DRAMATIC criticism is not what it was. It is kinder, if not more competent. Gone are the days when the physical defects of players, and shortcomings in their art, were equally vulnerable to the critic's shafts. Much that the older masters wrote of the actors in their day, though possibly deserved, might be libellous in ours. Yet their compliments could ...

... MYSELF AT THE PICTURES Two Big Films By James Agate FOR some time I have been inveighing against those of our smart playwrights who have thought to write war plays by trotting out the old familiar characters, the old stale plot and the old dreary wise-cracking, and putting them into a war setting. The result in every case has been a shallow catch-penny success-- with the unthinking. |V[OEL ...

... By Horace Horsnell Murder From Memory Ambassadors) GHOSTS that walk and talk were com paratively common in the old drama. They are seldom seen on the stage today. An impetuous thriller here and there may blend the quick and the dead, but such ghosts as a rule are of the red-herring order, more talked about than palpable. Few are cast for such important parts as that of the Ghost in Hamlet ...

... By Horace Horsnell Flare Path (Apollo) FROM Shakespeare to Sherriff, our native dramatists have been strongly attracted by the humours of soldiering. Even Mr. Shaw, in Arms and the Man, succumbed to their charm. And when a war play is written by a service playwright, the humours and heroics are likely to share equal honours. Shake speare's Henry V and Mr. Sherriff's Journey's End-- to cite two ...

... By Horace Horsnell Night of the Garter (Strand) One's first reaction to these headstrong revels, whether delight or dismay, depends rather on one's attitude to farce in general and what one expects of a ten-year-old with that pun in its title. Later reflection may lead one to feel that farce is the true surrealism. And indeed the attempts of modern painters to explore the terra incognita of ...

... Tales of Hoffmann at The Strand ARE you adventurous in your theatre going? If so, here is a new experience which you should be quick to enjoy. If, on the other hand, you are a dyed-in-the- wool operatic conventionalist, then stay away from the Strand Theatre, because George Kirsta's fantastication of the familiar Tales of Hoffman would make you very angry. I he first shock is to find ...

... By Horace Horsnell Home and Beauty (Playhouse) THE revival of this frivolous comedy should help to correct the view that, as a satirical artist, Mr. Somerset Maugham draws directly from the life. Its characters-- Victoria and her two husbands, at any rate, whose tangled affairs the plot unravels-- can hardly be credited with so prosaic an origin. They are of imagination all, or nearly all, ...

... By Horace Horsnell The Dancing Years (Adelphi) FEW, if any, of what may be called the classic actor-managers had the gift of creating their own raw material. They may have done memorable things with it, but the material came from without. Shakespeare and Molière, it is true, wrote the plays for the companies in which they acted; but they functioned under royal patronage and were not free ...