... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. Hollywood takes a rest from propa ganda speeches, Commando raids and sinister little yellow men, and gives us the lighter side of war in THE MORE THE MERRIER (Gaumont) The piece, which is an acceptable diversion for us too, is concerned with America s nome iront and wartime Washington's famous housing shortage. In the national emergency, with eight girls to every man in ...

... A Foreign Correspondent at Large The Eagle Squadron of the R.A.F. The Lives of William and Mary Bonaparte and the Modern Parallel By Vernon Fane THERE is a genus of news paper-men called foreign correspondents who have, in the last ten years, reached a peculiar eminence of their own. Of these, one of the best known is Mr. Vincent Sheean, whose reputation is of an early 1930's vintage, and ...

... By Horace Horsnell j Something in the Air (Palace) IT is great fun having Miss Cecily Court neidge back again. She is a thoroughly English comedienne, whose versatility, vitality and intimate good humour are unriv alled. And as long as she is in command of its numbers, this new musical comedy is all that its devisers intend, or her admirers could wish. Yet even she is mortal and when, like the ...

... By Horace Horsnell Show Boat (Sloll): The Vagabond King (W inter Garden) MUSICAL comedy has its classics no less renowned than, opera. Several of them have recently been revived; three are now playing to full houses, and more are promised. Such renaissance, though unusual, is not merely a sign of the times. In these difficult days, when so much theatre talent is otherwise engaged or ...

... TU By Horace Horsnell An Ideal Husband (Westminster) MR. ROBERT DONAT'S first season as a theatre manager opened very auspici ously. His inaugural production not only promises well, but should pleasantly sur prise playgoers who may have carelessly assumed that Oscar Wilde was a one-play dramatist-- The Importance of Being Earnest first, and the rest nowhere. It re-establishes An Ideal Husband ...

... By Horace Horsnell Sunny River Palace THIS American musical play is Show Boat in type and displacement. Its plot, like that of its famous predecessor, is period pastiche, in which true but ill-starred love runs its troubled course through Bohemian scenery. Opening leisurely with song and dance (pre sumably to give the local colour of New Orleans, circa 1806, time to dry) it develops ...

... By Horace Horsnell Brighton Rock (Gnrrick) HARDLY for family consumption, I feel, this Brighton Rock, which is ruthlessly adapted from what I am assured is quite a good book. Good, that is, in the read able, rather than the ethical sense. A common trouble with plays that are based on novels is that-- as with the boarding-house hash of comic fiction-- original virtue is apt to esćape in the re ...

... By Horace Horsnell Junior Miss (Saville) SPARE the rod and spoil-- I had almost said the child; but that would hardly cover the callow fauna that dominate this American play. Judy and her fellow co-eds look enough like children to deceive us at first into accepting them as such, and then being irritated by the mistake. They are young-- heavens, how young!-- and they speak a language we may ...

... By Horace Horsnell The Dark River (Whitehall) ABSENCE, they say, makes the heart grow fonder, and exile deepens the longing for home. Subtler, more deeply hidden longings, they tell us, are a common malady. These may range from unconscious desire to return to carefree childhood, to regret for more adult havens of lost happiness and content. Appreciating the dramatic possibilities ol such a ...

... By Horace Horsnell The Lisbon Story (Hippodrome) LIBRETTISTS who seek to break away from hampering convention in their writing of -'books for musical plays need all the encouragement they can get. They are a kind of perpetual pioneers, faced with pitfalls and problems that might well daunt genius itself. Few are as fortunate-- or for that' matter as successful-- as Da Ponte, who adapted the ...

... By Horace Horsnell Street and Low (Ambassadors) THIS witty revue has little in common with the lullaby from which its equivocal title is taken. Its sweetness is more tart, its lowness less balmy than the wind of the western sea. That is as it should be, for true revue is no respecter of sentiment. The dictionary defines it as a loosely constructed play or series of scenes or spectacles ...

... By Horace Horsnell Uncle Vanya (Westminster) WHEN the Stage Society produced Uncle Vanya in 1914, Chekov was, to us, still a comparatively unknown dramatist. And members of that select audience before which he made his English debut were so taken by surprise that some of them, we are told, after twiddling their critical thumbs before turning them down, walked out of the theatre. Though not yet ...