... Reviewed by PHILIP PAGE 'T'HE HASTY HEART (Aldwych).-- It was strange to find laughter and laughter of the right sort predominating in a play whose chief character is a man so seriously ill that he is given by the doctor only a few weeks to live. And the sole scene is a hospital, too (though I have heard plenty of laughter in hospitals). But in this case it is a war hospital somewhere in Burma ...

... Young Mrs. Barrington (Winter Garden) THE young Mrs. Barrington is a typical figure of the time. She was married four years ago to a dashing fighter pilot whom she has not seen since, and her married life has been no more than a brief, deliriously happy honeymoon and a long correspondence. On the eve of reunion there seems to be more than a chance that time may have made a fool of her and her ...

... IN his Foreword to Polter geist Over England, Mr. Harry Price says: It has long been at the back of my mind that I ought to write a history of Poltergeists, be cause they attract me so. A strange attraction indeed; for a Poltergeist is anything but an attractive phenomenon. Mr. Price defines it as ...

... MR. GEORGE ORWELL calls his ANIMAL FARM (Seeker and Warburg. 6s.) a fairy story. His publishers call it a good-natured satire upon dictatorship. You can pay your money and take your choice. I find it not much of a story there isn't a fairy in its ninety-one pages, and there is positively not a breath of good nature in it. The weapons of satire are surely the rapier and, at its most deadly, the ...

... IT is now nearly ten years since Rudyard Kipling died. If Mr. Hilton Brown's new appreciation-- RUD YARD KIPLING (Hamish Hamil ton. 10s. 6d.)-- had been pub lished then it might have created a literary sensation. It might even have been splashed in the popular Press under such a headline as The Riddle of Rudyard Kipling. Most people are aware that in his early twenties Kipling enjoyed an ...

... Merrie England (Princes) ASSOCIATION, they say, is more potent than the thing itself: by which is meant that if you go often to a bad hotel in good company you grow rather fond of the hotel. Merrie England is like the bad hotel. We have been there so often in the company of Edward German's music that we have grown to like the ridiculous libretto. At the Princes we are invited to share the same ...

... THE art of story-telling is a great deal rarer than one might think, judging by the flood of fiction to be pub lished month by month. It is a very great quality, though it does not necessarily bear any relation to good writing. When, of course, you have both, you have someone like Robert Louis Stevenson. But where the story telling gift exists, even the clumsiest writing can be forgiven, as in ...

... : Reviewed by Trevor zjfllen ADMIRAL SIR BERTRAM HOME RAMSAY has at least two claims to distinction. As C.-in-C. of the Allied Expeditionary Force in vading Hitler's fortress on D-Day he shouldered-- Commander Kenneth Ed wards, R.N., claims-- a greater respon sibility than any officer had ever been called upon to assume in the whole history of warfare. As a midshipman he went to serenade the ...

... ''Sigh No More (Piccadilly) AGREEABLE revues are not so frequent that we can afford to sulk over one on the plea that we had expected something different; and the unpretending pleasantness of Sigh No More has been, I fancy, somewhat obscured by those who insist on comparing it with the elaborate chromium-plated Coward Cochran shows of more extravagant days. True, Sigh No More is not champagne; ...

... THE book of the week is a reprint, first published eleven years ago, and now re issued to what should certainly be a grateful public. I would like to say first of all how heartily I applaud the pub lishers' action in using part of what is a universally exiguous allowance of paper to keep this book in print. Novels, except the very best of them, are enhemerals; but the biography of such a man ...

... Reviewed by PHILIP PAGE LJlCr isu Y [SavUle). mere are some good ■U features in this large-scale musical show, notably that large-scale comedian Mr. Fred Emnev, but, to be frank, not nearly enough of them. Mr. Emney and Mr. Richard Hearne provide some cheery knock-about fun, and the latter's dancing is always as amusing as it is amazing. Again, not enough of it, for Mr. Hearne practically dis ...

... Reviewed by PHILIP PAGE SIGH NO MORE (Piccadilly).-- Mr. Noel Coward is such a magician in the world of the theatre that even when he is not at the top of his form he can be relied upon to provide entertainment of a high standard. In this revue he is only once or twice at his best (in my opinion, exactly twice-- in his lyric about a Spanish girl and in his village pageant). But this is a ...