... Regent's Park One's delight on a shining night in the season of the year. As a variation on the Shakespearian repertory, Rostand's early comedy, in its costumes after Watteau, is the perfect entertainment for a fine evening in Regent's Park. Robert Atkins had good luck with it last season, and its revival on the right kind of July evening should satisfy both the ultra- romantic and the mildly ...

... Berkeley Lesser rabst htm about tnc army plot 01 1944 to seize power from the Nazi Party, and assassinate Hitler at Field Head quarters, with time-bomb planted in attache case. Semi-documentary treatment, jarring American commentary. ...

... Stratford-upon-Avon Not what we had hoped. At Stratford, Peter Brook's 1946 revival must remain on top. The present director, Peter Hall, has thought of the look of the thing rather than its sound. If you do not treat the piece as a young man's music, a night of quick, glitter ing rhythms, and of speeches that can quiver and blossom, it may become stiff, appear what a German critic once called ...

... The Trip to Bountiful Arts The old lady, made miserable by the nagging of her daughter-in-law and by her long imprisonment in a two-roomed city flat in Houston, pines for her old Texan country home and the salt air of the Gulf. In her eyes, Heaven lies around Bountiful. Badgered beyond the limit, she takes a stolen journey. The place is deserted and ruinous, rotting-timbcred in a swamp, but it ...

... Westminster It is richly tempting to laugh at the puzzle-play. Many of us, at one time or another, have tried to set the table on a roar with mocking, and certainly these extravagances are not hard to mock. But there is a large public for them we must regard a puzzle on its merits just as we regard the scattiest play of ideas, and a new one, which Jack Roffcy and Gordon Harbord have adapted ...

... By Howard Swiggett. (Hodder and Stoughton; 13s. 6d.) When Allan Wiley, distinguished American administrator work ing in London, on his deathbed summons his protege Richard Deering to take charge of a mysterious strongbox; when two women appear on the scene, Wiley's mistress, the beautiful Lady Laracor, following on the heels of an intriguing and anonymous girl desperate for the return of her ...

... By James Norman. (Michael Joseph; 12s. 6d.) Here we have something much shorter and sweeter in this affectionate tale of a new priest and a little Mexican town. Santiago de Gante is a place of troubled faith, for things will never go right while the statue of the patron saint is kept from its proper place in the church. But the statue is held by General Braga, a worldly businessman with an eye ...

... Bv David Unwin. (Michael Joseph; 128. 6d.) Looking over the Heath (Hampstead) is a big house made into three flats an artist at the top, the Moons, home from the Colonies, in the middle, and at the bottom the naturalised-British Karel Peters with his cosy wife and their children. The artist's wife, young, pretty, finds refuge from her unspeakable husband in an affair with Mr. Moon; her young ...

... By Herman Wouk. (Jonathan -ape; *5s-l inevitaDly Mark twain comes into the blurb of an American book about boys, but Tom Sawyer is the right comparison to make with this objective, sympathetic, moving and often mightily funny story of a few crowded months in the life of Herbie Bookbinder. Herbie is fat, clever, and eleven; he lives in the Bronx, where he attends a public school, and the book ...

... Eminent Victorians -By VERNON FANE Biographies of Samuel Smiles and Mary Kingsley Travel in Three Continents War and Health A Novel about Transatlantic Flight, and Other Fiction IDIOTS never change, said Samuel Smiles on one of the occasions when he changed his job. Sensible men change for the better. The saying was typical of the man who had been a doctor, a newspaper editor, a railway ...

... THE Ordinary Man is undoubtedly the central figure of this century. For him have been designed the phenomena of our civilization-- Holly wood beauties, washing machines, wage negotiations, and indirectly, big business. Sloan Wilson takes his Ordinary Man (typified, in America, by wearing a grey flannel suit) from several rungs up the social and economic ladder. Ex-paratrooper Tom Rath has a ...

... TRIAL scenes on the stage are said never to fail. In cold fact we can most of us recollect at least one instance of an author having put the wrong witnesses into the box with desolating effects on our spirits. The great strength of The Caine Mutiny Court Martial at the Hippodrome is that there is no obvious staginess about the witnesses giving evidence for or against an officer of the American ...