... 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 ...

... -By Vernon Fane Norwegian Autobiography, and Life in Norfolk Conflict in France Death in Wyoming /Esop Refold The Latest Peter Cheyney IN the past few months many good and moving books have come out of Norway, and the latest of these is called RETURN TO HAPPINESS (Mac millan. 18s.), the autobio graphy of another kind of Norwegian. Mr. j onas Liea lias, m common witn Ms leiiow- Norwegian ...

... A BATCH OF NEW NOVELS From Britain, America and Occupied Europe An Account of Lord B eaverbrook in Whitehall and Other Books of the Week By Vernon Fane IN her sensitive introduction to SOUTHERN HARVEST (Gollancz. ios. 6d.) Miss Clare Leighton writes that this book was written out of my own need. Missing the earth of England and the people of that earth, I wandered around here in the ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. A VERY young scientist I know, a four teen-year-old boy by the name of Smith, has an odd hobby. In all the hours he can spare from dissecting frogs and combining combustible elements, he goes to see Technicolor pictures. He goes to see no other pictures. He does not like pictures. He rarely likes Technicolor pictures. But he studies them gloomily, morosely, in the interests ...

... . By G. A. LEJEUNE. WALT DISNEY, who started his professional career through a mouse whom he met in an office, has become one of America's leading educators for the duration. Educational and propaganda films for the U.S. Government now represent more than three-fourths of the output from the Disney Studios. He is making, or has made, a string of instructional films for the Navy a series for ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. RUNNING to PARA DISE is a novel of escape, though far from being an escapist novel. The hero, Adrian Dormant, rather than wait for his class to be called up in England, joins the French Foreign Legion, and sees much fierce fighting before France signs the Armistice. Most of his friends are killed, and he himself becomes a prisoner of war in German hands. Escaping from ...

... 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 ...