... Fredd Wayne's Success At the Berkeley Restaurant. W.l, Fredd Wayne (from South Pacific scores a marked success with original patter, catchy songs, and crisp lyrics. At the start, after mentioning very many introductions and their outcome-- Flanagan meet ing Allen, Ava Gardner meeting Frank Sinatra, and so on he presents himself to patrons. Sly digs at British types are worked in, a brief but ...

... ctfi Much Ado About Koiliing (Pliocnix) Anthony Cookman THE new year at the theatre could hardly have begun more happily than with this revival. Arranged, acted and dressed with a delicate, imaginative expertness that brings to full flower the glowing Renaissance life of the comedy, it is quite the loveliest and the gayest entertainment in town. The event happens also to be fraught with ...

... . By C. E. Vulllamy. Michael Joseph 10s. 6 d.) A lively thriller peppered with satire. It j is based on a nightmarish piece of fantasy but brings if into focus and keeps it there. ...

... . By Pamela Barrington. (barker 9s. bd.) Miss Barrington sticks to precedents that are wearing a little thin. Murder, jewels, polioe, cockney dialect, and so on. By binding or printing error there were sixteen blank pages in my copy, but it did not very much matter. ...

... . By Stanley Jackson. (Odhams 15s.) Mr. Jackson is an adept in that most difficult undertaking, the biography of living people. He follows his excellent i study of Mr. Justice Humphreys with this s study of a vital and in many ways para- j doxical personality. He writes racily, with an easy mastery of facts and a liking for a good story. ...

... Macbeth (Mermaid) I should not have been at all surprised if someone had appeared in Inverness during the Murder scene and observed I zeem you 'm gwain purty fast. This Mermaid revival, which whisks along at Elizabethan speed (credit to Joan Swinstead) is spoken in an accent similar (we are told) to that commonly em ployed by educated Londoners at the beginning of the seventeenth century. ...

... Casque d'Or (Golden Mane) {Academy) I am told by a man who should know, ince his business is to show and distribute foreign films in England, that what modern audi.-nces hope for in French pictures is plenty of sex and violence. Their hopes_will not be dis: ppo-nted by Casque d'Or Golden Marie based on the career of a real-life charmer, -/ho was supposed to bring bad luck to all her lovers. ...

... Letter from Paris Aldwych IN comparison, events at the Aldwych are creamily mild. But then comparison would be wildly unfair. The letter from Paris appears in an American sensational newspaper, The Reverberator, during the late 1880's. It contains many details of the private affairs of the wealthy Probert family, expatriates long settled in Paris and now more French than American. The ...

... Full House (Odeon. Marble Arch It would be presumptuous to assert that the Somerset Maugham films, Quartet, Trio and Encore, made in this country, prompted Holly wood to follow our example, and produce an omnibus film from the works of another prince of short story-tellers, O. Henry. But whether it is a case of post hoc or propter hoc, the thing has been done. Full House contains five of mp w. ...

... . By E. H. Clements. Hodder and Stoughton 12s. 6d.) A sensational novel of the old, le Queux school, but most proficiently done. ...

... . By Alex Atkinson. (Peter Davies 12s. 6d.) Life in a provincial repertory company. ...

... . By Ellery Queen. (Gollancz 10s. 6 d.) Twelve short stories. Up to standard. j ...