... The Glass Slipper (St. James's) By Horace Horsnell IT cannot have been merely to avoid con fusion with other seasonable Cinderellas that Herbert and Eleanor Farjeon call their fairy-tale with music by its alternative title, The Glass Slipper. One feels that it was rather to mark differences than to disclaim kinship. The differences are fundamental. Their version amounts to a restoration, a ...

... Sweet Yesterday (Adelplii) A MUSICAL romance does well to be shame lessly romantic. Nobody will complain because the hero of this piece not only delivers French Royalists from Napoleon's prisons after the manner of the Scarlet Pim pernel in the days of the Revolution, but is also the spy who made Trafalgar possible and has himself an affair of the heart which brings him in fine operatic style ...

... Follow The Girls (His Majesty's) MR. ARTHUR ASKEY has ordered cham pagne at some expensive joint or other and finds he has not enough to pay for a cup of coffee for his girl friend. Dilemma. The lamp-shade of his table is pink; at an adjoining one it is blue; and a line in the dialogue makes it clear that waitresses serve only the tables which have lamp-shades the same colour as their caps. ...

... TU The Hasty Heart (A Id wye h) SENTIMENTALISTS have as much right as cynics to enjoy themselves in the theatre, and here is our chance. Captain John Patrick's little play celebrating the triumph of human kindness in a convalescent ward behind the front in Burma adroitly invites our tears, but it keeps us smiling through them. It is a most cheering bit of pathos. War and wounds and untimely ...

... MYSELF AT THE PICTURES A Witty Film By James Agate WHEN I was a boy I was entirely taken in and captivated by historical novels. I really believed that life in Pompeii was such as Lytton described, and in South American forests such as Kingsley pretended. That such were the exact words spoken by Ivanhoe to Rowena, by Hereward the Wake to the Last of the Barons. I believed, in a word, in the ...

... The Wind of Heaven (St. James's) SCRATCH an Anglo-Saxon, some say, and you find a Celt. At any rate, there is enough of the Celt in the average London playgoer to assure a long run to the very Welsh play of Mr. Emlyn Williams now setting the very urban stage of George Alexander's old theatre a-tingle with the emotions of villagers who believe themselves to be touched by a wind from Heaven. ...

... The Years Between (Wyndhani's) By Horace Horsnell THE course of true love, says Lysander, never did run smooth. I wonder what would happen if for once it did; if from curtain rise to curtain fall the romance of hero and heroine ran its unruffled course, free from the buffets of fate, tiffs, misunder standings and what not imposed by inventive dramatists. Would the novelty please or be damned? ...

... ''The Assassin (Savoy) ANY one who writes a romantic play about an event as recent as the assassination of Admiral Darlan runs the risk of dis tracting his audience with a quiz of irrelevant questions. Was Darlan's murderer executed? Yes, of course-- but when?-- or did he shoot himself? And did he, in fact, profess Royalist principles? vVas Darlan shot at a radio station, or in his own office ...

... MYSELF IT TIE PICTURES Concerning Revivals By James Agate NEWS comes of the revival of The Sign of the Cross (Plaza). This film is, of course, an absurdity, but an absurdity on the grand scale. I have been sufficiently interested in the revival to look up what was said of Wilson Barrett's play in 1896. William Archer took the line that this orgy-- which he was sufficiently rattled to spell as ...

... reviewing BOOKS ELIZABETH BOWES No. 7 JAMES AGATE'S Ego's are, from the point of view of the reviewer, at once enticing and intimidating. They are hyper-personal; and, at the same time, they create an effect of august distance. Their spontaneity-- for not a line seems forced-- is of the kind that evokes warm reaction rather than tepid judgment. Thev are a continuous comment-- here and there ...

... : Reviewed by Alan Seymour EVEN the most loyal admirers of Charles Dickens have to admit that there were moments when he seemed to be writing more for his own amusement than for his reader's, but such a criticism cannot be levelled at his great-granddaughter. Thursday Afternoons (Michael Joseph, 10s. fid.) is Monica Dickens's new I novel and it is written exclusively for you and me. I don't ...

... : ■Reviewed by Trevor zTfllen NORMALLY I rebut connoisseurs of food and wine who show up my abysmal ignorance of anything subtler than Chateauneuf de Pape --never mind the year-- and persuade me that I am a savage to prefer simple fare to high blood pressure. But M. André L. Simon may be excused, for is he not a king among diners, and did he not inspire the Wine and Food Society and its ...