... At this point I can repeat a quotation and say How soon this mightiness meets misery. Mightiness at Strat ford misery for much of the evening at the Duchess though I have to acknowledge that the house received the play well and gave a cheerful welcome to its cheerful author, Louis Ducreux. (The English adaptation is by Roma June.) If you can get into the spirit of the piece at once, all (I ...

... . By Maurice Chevalier. (Odhams 12s. 6d.) THIS avoids nearly all the weakness of most autobiographies by famous stars of stage and screen. It is not packed with those tire somely over-constructed funny stories about actors which always seem to end with some devastating piece of repartee. It is not boastful or self-congratulatory; it does not describe impossible hardships or unlikely contacts ...

... Cbt Tfc- Henry VIII (Stratford Festival) THERE is good reason this year to hope that the stage of the Memorial Theatre will at last become the most attractive part of the pilgrimage to Stratford. Shakespearian associations and the charm of Stratford itself (a place where clocks move more slowly than elsewhere and time seems pleasantly endless) have succeeded in making the festival ...

... HENRY THE EIGHTH. The long pageant-chronicle, with its theme of the transience of fame See how soon this mightiness meets misery is uncommonly awkward to keep movie 2, in the theatre. Every now and then we feel that Shakespear and Fletcher, finding it hard work, have to seek anxiously for revived inspiration. There are great things in the piece but it has also some linking passages which need ...

... REVIEWS by C. A. LEJEUNE We are wont to complain that American films about the war, even when they deal with the European theatre, are apt to exclude any mention of Britain's share in the fighting; or. at best, slip in a perfunctory reference in export copies for the United Kingdom. Nobody can say that the British film, They Were Not Divided, pays the same discourtesy to the Americans. ...

... A Great Novel Si'tut Field iff SHORTER NOTICES THE AFRICAN WITCH, by Joyce Cary (Michael Joseph, 9s. 6d.). Re-publication of one of this most excellent author's finest novels. I know of none who has surpassed him in detailed analysis of the African scene. The strokes are bold, the knowledge profound, the story-telling magnificent. Chekhov In My Life, by Lydia Avilor (John Lehmann, 10s. 6d.' ...

... f by Cyril Butcher v J LOOKING through some past issues of The Sketch, some time ago, we were particularly struck by what our predecessor, Alan Mel---, begging your pardon, Robert Dane, had to say about the probable future attitude of playwrights toward television. He was discussing the opening of the Sutton Coldfield transmitting station, last December. Others are due to follow within the ...

... . By Doris Lessing. (Michael Joseph 9s. 6 d.) THE title of this book, like so many affected and inapt titles of present-day novels, is a phrase from a passage of Mr. T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and it is only fair to say that almost any string of words in the fifteen lines of that poem would have served as well. Why not The Wind's Home? Or It Has No Windows? Or The Jungle Crouched Or even ...

... . By Merle Miller. (Lehmann 10s. 6d.) THIS is an uneven book about the Communist scare in the United States, which has been published rather aptly, and will make us once again say, with forced con viction and relief, that it can't happen here. 'Brad Douglas has a small post in the State Department at Washington, and since he has had some extreme Left Wing sympathies in the past, finds himself ...

... MOLTI SOGNI PER LE STRADA. Molti Sogni per le Strada (The Street Has Many Dreams) is a modest little Italian film that I should hate to see overlooked in the excitement over such major works as Bicycle Thieves and The Miracle. It puts one in mind of Four Steps in the Clouds, which is not really surprising, since a young man called Piero Tellini wrote the stories of both pictures. He also ...

... the inspector general.-- Hollywood has gone to Gogol for the latest Danny Kaye story, but the star comes out of it better than the author. As a gypsy impostor for an emissary of Napoleon, he outsmarts not only a set of corrupt town councillors, but the j producers of a patchy picture. the dancing years.- Yes if you like the Ivor Novello shows yes, definitely. Music as soothing as a warm bath ...

... By J. C. Trewin It is a long time since I remember being so impressed by the truth of a scene as I was during the first act of Wynyard Browne's play at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. The place is a Norfolk vicarage, the occasion a family gathering on Christmas Eve. From the start one knows that the family is a unity, all of a piece; that it is not a huddle of ill-assorted types tossed ...