... 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 ...

... 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 ...