... Reviewed by PHILIP PAGE FLYING COLOURS.-- With a bit more polish and a slicker production this revue at the Lyric Theatre would have flown to even more colourful heights. As it is, it is pretty good and certainly well above the average. With Miss Binnie Hale and Mr. Douglas Byng in the cast, furnished, as they are here, with worthy material, this could hardly fail to be so. Miss Hale appears ...

... 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 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 ...

... GLIMPSES AT OTHER LANDS Russia and China of To-day Peru of the Incas 7s[ew York Mysteries and Fantasies Comedy Down on the Farm -By Vernon Fane MR. A. F. TSCHIFFELY states his aims clearly in the preface of his new book when he writes: If I have succeeded in giving a simple, yet vivid, scrupulously accurate and clear picture of the con quest of Peru and what led to it, and have produced a ...

... : Reviewed by Trevor' zTfllen NO one in Cairo, Mr. Cecil Beaton implies, will ever need the Kipling epitaph: Here lies the fool who tried to hustle the East. He found the atmosphere of G.H.Q. not at all bracing-- rather like a reunion dinner of old schoolboys --and decided that no war leader should be encouraged to remain there for long, for Blimpism, plus the Cairene climate, were two of ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. COMPARED with a pic ture, a frame is a mechanical thing, owing something indeed to art, but not much, a reach-me-down adjunct which the painter per haps spends a few minutes over choosing, but not more. It is not made, as a rule, for a special picture: it is made for any picture. Yet few would deny that a picture looks better in a frame, however unsuit able, than without ...

... -By Vernon Fane A Learned Treatise on Agricultural Conditions An Eighteenth Century Scene Robert Payne's Exotic Story of the Far East A Muse in the Mediterannean Gastronomic Successes ivith a Tin-opener PROFESSOR N. GANGU LEE has written an interesting short treatise on a subject which is of the greatest importance to us now, and should remain in that relation to our national life after the ...

... Reviewed by PHILIP PAGE THE WINGLESS VICTORY.-- Mr. Maxwell Anderson has a considerable reputation as a dramatist on the other side of the Atlantic. Those who know him only by his The Wingless Victory may, perhaps, be permitted to ask why. Compared with this portenlous piece of verbosity, Tolstoy's War and Peace, which preceded it at the Phoenix Theatre, was a snappy, strip-tease act. ...

... MYSELF AT THE PICTURES Ring me up, Wait! By James Agate APROPOS of the balloon Dr. Johnson said: We now know a method of mounting into the air, and, I think, are not likely to know more. I had now rather find a medicine that can ease an asthma. We now know a great deal about aeroplanes and are likely, I think, to know a great deal more. All the same, I had rather now find a method of ...

... By Horace Horsnell Pink String and Sealing Wax (Duke of York's) CHOOSING a title for a new play must be as tricky as choosing one for a new peer. What does this one suggest to you-- a theme for a surrealist painter, or a conversation piece by the Walrus and the Carpenter? Actually, it has nothing to do with either of those æsthetic extremes. Mr. Roland Pertwee is not that kind of dramatist. He ...

... MYSELF AT THE PICTURES Two Good Films By James Agate Watch on the Rhine (Warner and Regal, Marble Arch) is in one way poorer than the play but in many ways better. Herman Shumlin, who directs, seems to have had an inspiration amounting to a brain wave. This is to leave the horrors of Nazi misrule where Lillian Hellman left them-- to the imagination. Throughout the entire picture we do not ...

... By Horace Horsnell Flying Colours (Lyric) IF the bright particular stars that adorn our stage were ruled by a benevolent autocrat, and I were he, an old but not impertinent problem would not have been raised once more by this revue. It concerns Miss Binnie Hale, who adorns some of the programme's more memorable features. That problem, which is purely speculative, may be briefly re-stated: is ...