... By Horace Horsnell Strike a New Note (Prince of Wales) IN this type of popular revue, a new note is certainly to be welcomed; and if Mr. George Black's latest rouser does not con sistently strike it, the players do. They are young, eager, and professional. The programme informs us that they are boys and girls who have been gathered from every part of the country, needing but the opportunity to ...

... By Horace Horsnell The Merry Widow (His Majesty' s) The Merry Widow, Daly's Theatre, Leicester Square in June, 1907: what different days, what brighter nights this revival recalls! Though lively, the pace was somehow less swift thirty-six years ago, when Léhar's melodies first entranced, and Lily Elsie's flower-like charm created, as the stage historian reminds us, a perfect furore. ...

... By Horace Horsnell The Russians (Playhouse) A HUNDRED years separate the writing of that lovely play, A Month in the Country, from that of this heroic contemporary melodrama; and though they are both Russian, they have as little in common as peace and war. For whereas Turgenev approaches his theme romantically, and handles it as a poet, Konstantin Simonov, author of The Russians, writes as a ...

... By Horace Horsnell The Romance of David Garrick (St. James s) YOUNG actors, who take their profession at least as seriously as they take themselves, are sometimes conscious of the classics, and aspire to play the classic roles. Circum stances, however, hot only alter cases, but are apt to thwart ambitions. The theatre, too, is not an academy of art but a business concern in which young actors ...

... MYSELF AT THE PICTURES Bosh and Tosh By James Agate LADY ELEANOR SMITH is an excellent novelist, who can tell a good tale whether it be about ballerinas or circus-riders. She moves easily from country to country and period to period, and has all those graces of style which, when the yarn she happens to be pitching is not particularly new, conceal the fact. In the cinema the graces are bound to ...

... By Horace Horsnell It's Time to Dance (Winter Garden MR. JACK BUCHANAN is a first-rate light comedian, and his return to the London footlights is most welcome. He is, moreover, a star who does not abuse his ascendancy by shining alone, but shares it with worthy colleagues. This new show, which he has produced, is a musical one; and though its devisers-- librettists, lyricists, composers, and ...

... By Horace Horsnell The Desert Song (Prince of Wales) YOU may probably remember the land of Araby whose songs, in the good old pre crooner days, every drawing-room tenor worth his alt used to sing. It lies, one would say, somewhere between Doughty's exclusive Arabia Deserta and The Garden of Allah thrown open to the public by Mr. Robert Hichens. Its attractions have been modernised since the ...

... By Horace Horsnell Ten Little Niggers (St. James's) THE best nightmares do not always inspire the best table-talk. Indeed, as related at breakfast by their still quaking dreamers, they can be notoriously tedious. So is it with critical post-mortems on stage thrillers. In action these apocryphal affairs may excite or amuse by keeping the playgoer in thrilled suspense; but, like fireworks or ...

... By Horace Horsnell This Time It's Love (Comedy) ON the theatre bill of fare, love is to l'amour rather what roast beef is to bœuf à la mode. They have indeed such different connotations that, knowing this comedy to be an adaptation from the French, we are not tempted to take its title too literally. The original was written by Louis Verneuil, and its cool craftsmanship, freedom from ...

... By Horace Horsnell Arc tie Triomphe (Plicenix) MR. IVOR NOVELLO'S latest play is un deniably canonical. No one could mis take it for a work by Noel Coward, Wagner, or Gilbert and Sullivan. Its amiable features-- musical, sentimental and dramatic-- are as clearly his own as those of Hamlet, say, are Shakespearean, or the unwinking regard of the waxen celebrities of the Marylebone Road is ...

... By Horace Horsnell Landslide f Westminster) THIS drama of adolescent adventure in the Alps comes to us from the French, but seems somehow to have lost its way. It promises to be a problem-raiser, but thinks, I won't say better, but less seriously, of it. In older days it might have been a morality thriller, propounding, through the plight of its characters and their behaviour under stress, ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. DESTINATION CHUNG KING is the auto biography of a Chinese lady, born in Honan and bred in Peking, who, in 1937, when barely twenty, came to London to study obstetrics. Her natural bent was for literature, but Science was our god, a beneficent god to make of China a rich and happy nation. At that time she was a pacifist, and had many bitter arguments with her childhood ...