... By Horace Horsnell The Dark River (Whitehall) ABSENCE, they say, makes the heart grow fonder, and exile deepens the longing for home. Subtler, more deeply hidden longings, they tell us, are a common malady. These may range from unconscious desire to return to carefree childhood, to regret for more adult havens of lost happiness and content. Appreciating the dramatic possibilities ol such a ...

... 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 ...

... 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 Panama Hattie (Piccadilly) LIKE ancient Gaul, this modern American hullabaloo is divided into three parts: music, spectacle, and comedy; and in that respect it is traditional. The placing of these three elements, however, is as follows: comedy (highly knockabout) first, Mr. Cole Porter's music second, spectacle a good wartime third. Such plot as there is gets in a word or ...