... MYSELF AT THE PICTURES Open Letter to Sir Alexander Korda By James Agate DEAR Sir Alexander, First let me say how glad we are to see you in this country again. We have missed your imagination, your drive and your personality. But my purpose in writing to you is not to pay you compliments, however well deserved, but to make a suggestion. It is always said that criticism should be Constructive. ...

... MYSELF AT THE PICTURES Half a Masterpiece By James Agate EXPRESSIONISM in the theatre is, I am glad to say, dying. The expressionist producer gloried in posing his charac ters on precarious step-ladders, straddled athwart beams and squatting on the apices of triangles-- so long as these characters were thus perched and poised the matter of their jabbering was immaterial I have long thought ...

... TU By Horace Horsnell She Follows Me About (Garrick) MR. BEN TRAVERS calls his new play a comedy, and he may be right. Con noisseurs of farce, however, whom he has generously catered for in the past, need not feel snubbed on that account. After all, what's in a name, when the author of Rookery Nook. Thark, and other redoubtable riots does the christening? What was there is here. Common sense ...

... By/ Horace Horsnell 7'/i ...

... By Horace Horsnell Everyman: International Ballet (Lyric) IN the old days one of the minor pleasures of the ballet was the Argument, or synopsis of the plot, printed on the programme. This was written in a style all its own, romantic and elusive; and, often less explicit than the action it sought to explain, it fascinated rather than enlightened. One read it hurriedly before the house-lights ...

... By Horace Horsnell Love for Love (Phoenix) THIS famous comedy was first performed over two hundred and fifty years ago, when Congreve was twenty-six. It has always been his most popular play, and has often been revived. Handsome is, they say, as handsome does, and the present revival by Mr. John Gielgud does not lack splendour. The reception at the Phœnix Theatre could hardly have been more ...

... 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 ...