... Lady Windermere's Fan (Haymarket) A FASHIONABLE play now some fifty years out of fashion, an audaciously clever, timidly stupid piece of good theatre, Lady Windermere's Fan sets the modern producer a succession of delicate problems. What will his audience make of a husband without comic sense enough to tell his wife that the woman she supposes to be his mistress is really her own mother. ...

... Tomorrow's Eden (Embassy) THERE was a time, according to Mr. Shaw, when an idea had to be at least twenty years old before it was allowed into a theatre. With some assistance from Mr. Shaw, we have changed all that. Nobody will have the hardihood to assert that the authors of this play are shy of topical ideas. How are the fighting men going to feel now that the tension of peril has snapped? ...

... : Reviewed by Rrevor zAllen HANDSOME rake has been a stock term of romancers, yet the most successful rakes have often been plain, even ugly men. John Wilkes, passion ately addicted to the pursuit of women all his life, had a jaw that was crooked and prominent, squinting eyes set close together in an odd malevo lent leer, a high bony forehead and a flat truncated nose, but his charm was ...

... MR. GERALD BULLETT is a scholar and a poet, with the good sense to leave poetic prose to the experi menters, and to write with the lucidity and the feeling for the right and inevitable world of the real prose stylist. His out put lately has been small, and his new, long novel all the more gratefully received. THE ELDER- BROOK BROTHERS (Dent. ros. 6d.) takes the form of three closely-woven ...

... THOSE who think of Ger many in terms of Vansit- tartism or anti-Vansittartism, or who are led away by such cheap jingles as Don't let 's be beastly to the Germans, should be compelled to read THE COURSE OF GERMAN HISTORY, by A. J. P. Taylor (Hamish Hamilton. 12s. 6d.). For those who would under stand the issues being settled at Potsdam and the problems that are bound to arise therefrom, this ...

... . B/ L. P. HARTLEY. THE RESCUE, as those who heard it given on the wireless last year will remember, is an experiment in a new art-form. What that form is, and how it works, is the subject of Mr. Sackville-West's most in teresting and suggestive preamble to his play. It is a play with a musical com mentary, the music being used to describe states of mind, suggest or heighten emotional ...

... Kiss and Tell (Phoenix) AMERICAN playwrights appear to be under the spell of a curious obsession. They are resolved, by hook or crook, to turn out a comic masterpiece on the theme of pre cocious love. Wives and mothers, the woman of thirty and the lass of twenty-one, all must retire for the moment in favour of the maid of sixteen. One attempt after another is con sidered worthy of our ...

... MOST of the books this week are concerned with war and the contemporary scene, which is not unnatural, since the majority of writers work from experience, whether per sonal or hearsay. Of the present batch, the most distinctive novel is Mr. Nevil Shute's MOST SECRET (Heinemann. 9s. 6d.), which is the story of three young officers with per sonal scores to settle with the Germans. They are all ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. THE Army Film Units of Britain and the United States have made a combined record of the Allied campaign in Western Europe from D-Day toVE-Day, and have called it THE TRUE GLORY. The reference is to a phrase in Sir Francis Drake's prayer before the Armada, Oh, Lord, when Thou givest Thy servants to endeavour any great matter, grant us also to know that it is not the ...

... The First Gentleman (New) THEATRICALLY speaking, the First Gentle man is eternally the Prince Regent. When he appears on the stage we expect to see him, not as the Prince of Wales (the good-looking, colourless youth who figured lately in the short-lived Gay Pavilion), and not as George IV (whom we are apt in our vague way to confuse with the other three), but as the Regent, that flamboyantly ...

... FOR the first time I have regretted this week not having at least one friend who was well-informed in English criminal circles. I would have asked such a man to tell me, out of the fullness of his knowledge, whether it is a fact that in this decade the English crook speaks a poor brand of prohibition Because they are beginning to in fiction, and I don t care for it. It provokes in me, as a ...

... Reviewed by PHILIP PAGE FOR CRYING OUT LOUD (Stoll). The title of this revue is a fair sample of the type of entertainment it affords. There is neither subtlety nor wit, but these are hardly suited to the broad acres of the Stoll Theatre. What Mr. Jack Hylton, who presents the show, has been shrewd enough to realise is that there is a huge public for broad jokes, slap-dash and very noisy ...