... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. WHEN somebody observes to Cole Porter, in NIGHT AND DAY (Warner Theatre), shaking his head over one of the Master's more esoteric numbers, You should have been born on the East Side, like some of our more popular boys, I felt it was a cry from the heart of an anguished screen-writer. Did I say screen-writer? I should have said writers. It takes no fewer than four of ...

... . By JOHN RUSSELL. HAMLET without the Prince is proverbi ally a poor affair; but if one may judge from the Old Vic production at the New Theatre, LEAR with out the King would make an excellent short melodrama of family life. One of the virtues of Mr. Olivier's production is that each of the subsidiary characters, so often foreshortened in the interests of a star actor, is given room and ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. IN this age of chronic political crisis one looks with a new interest at the past, to see what problems the statesmen of those days had, how they arose and how they were settled. Could they have been avoided or did they spring from the nature of things and people? The sixteenth century, like our own, was a time of violence and extreme political unrest. It was also a time ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. GOOD-BYE, or rather, au revoir to the Carlton, that luxurious little theatre in the Hay market. With BLUE SKIES in occupa tion, I don't expect to have to review another picture there until the robin redbreasts, as Madam Butterfly so daintily puts it, are busy nesting. Paramount have used the same simple formula for Blue Skies that they used in the case of Holiday Inn. ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. IF one were looking for categories in which works of fiction might con veniently be pigeon-holed, one might hit on three: the cosmopolitan, the national and the regional. Henry James's novels belong to the first group; Jane Austen's to the second; Hardy's to the third. The characters in The Wings of the Dove are equally at home, or equally not at home, in England or in ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. PILGRIMS AND PIONEERS is well- named, for Sir Harry Brittain has been a pioneer in many enterprises, and never a more successful one than when he helped to found the Pilgrims' Club. That was in 1902. .Later, tne isritisn Pilgrims, and another corre sponding body, the Pilgrims of America, proved them selves a powerful instrument for union between the two countries. In 1907 ...

... By JOHN RUSSELL. A GREAT venture is in hand at Sadler's Wells --nothing less than a production sometime next year of Verdi's Otello. The Wells has always kept in mind the ideal that opera should be produced as a dramatic whole, rather than as a series of disconnected outbursts by favourite singers; and in Otello, which is a work of Shakespearean stature, this approach should yield great ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. CLASSICAL music, as I once heard a cinema magnate remark to an archbishop, is box- off. these days, and it was clearly inevitable that the film producers, having done their duty by the lives and works of most of the great composers, should turn their attention to the virtuosi. Nobody need be surprised that Gainsborough should have decided to make a film about the life of ...

... . By JOHN RUSSELL. GREAT nonsense is being talked about applause at the opera. Applause is a necessary poison for Italian singers, and the hushed attention appropriate to the Three Choirs Festival is quite out of place at a performance of Tosca or Rigoletto. Nor is it the case, as a most dis tinguished critic has suggested, that what may be courtesy in Italy is bad manners here. Good ...