AT THE PLAY.
"Just Like Judy."
If the author of Just Like Judy will look into that commodious classic, Mrs. Beeton's Cookery Book, he will find a formula for light pastry. And if he will proceed to the (for him) enlivening adventure of essaying a tartlet, he will find that most fatal among a host of fatal errors will be any failure to preserve the due proportion of ingredients. I do not suggest that there is as rigid a formula for light comedy. But certainly Mr. Denny threw in too many unnecessary mystifications and crude explanations in proportion to the wit, wisdom and lively incident of his confection. In particular he was constantly making some of his characters tell the others what we of the audience either already knew or quite easily guessed. To exhaust my tedious-homely metaphor, if you put in a double measure of water the mixture will refuse to rise. And that I imagine is essentially what happened to Just Like Judy.
Irish Judy, a charmingly pretty busybody, outwardly just like Miss Iris Hoey, comes to Peter Keppel's studio and hears that this casual youth has got into a deplorable habit of putting off his marriage with her friend Milly. She (Judy) will see to that! She assumes the rôle of a notorious Chelsea model, whom proper Peter has never seen. Peter knocks his head on the mantelpiece, just where a shrapnel splinter had hit him, and is persuaded that she, Judy McCarthy, affecting to be Trixie O'Farrel, is his wife. It all seems very horrible to him, but, shell-shock or no shell-shock, he sets to work to paint her portrait in a business-like way, and at the end of four hours it doesn't seem at all horrible. And by the time it is explained that it was all a joke (some people do have such a nice sense of humour) he is all for rushing off to the registry-office, Judy agreeing.
Not that Judy is a minx. She did her level best to make two people who obviously didn't love one another fulfil their engagement, instead of, like a sensible woman, accepting the inevitable, which was, as it happens, so congenial to her. What puzzled me was Peter's indignation with poor Milly when he found that she really didn't love him (but, on the contrary, a bounder called Crauford), yet couldn't bear to cause him unhappiness, and was sacrificing herself for him. As that was his attitude precisely, I suppose he felt annoyed by this lack of originality. If we men are like that, it wasn't nice of Mr. Denny to give us away.
At any rate I am sure Mr. Donald Calthrop didn't believe in Peter all the time. When he did he was very good indeed. When he didn't he was horrid. Did Miss Iris Hoey believe in Judy? I am not so sure. I suspect not. Did I believe in either? I did not.
I was a little surprised that Miss Joan Vivian-Rees should so overplay her Trixie. Her work is certainly in general not like that, and I conjecture the influence of some baleful autocrat of a producer. It seemed to me that Miss Mildred Evelyn's Milly was, all things considered, a capable and consistent study of a desperately unsympathetic character, a more difficult and creditable feat than is commonly supposed.
T.
"Wild Geese."
Mr. Jack Buchanan (Hon. Bill Malcolm). "What's the idea? Are you by any chance trying to give me the cold shoulder?"
Miss Phyllis Monkman (Violet Braid). "No. I just keep on doing this for the look of the thing."
I should hesitate to accuse Mr. Ronald Jeans of originality in the design of his musical trifle at the Comedy. The idea of a company of women that bans the society of men is at least as old as the Attic stage. But it is to his credit that though the theme invited suggestiveness he at least avoided the licence of The Lysistrata. Indeed there were moments when his restraint filled me with respectful wonder. Thus, though the Pacific Island to which the Junior Jumper Club retired—with no male attendant but the Club porter—clearly indicated a bathing scene, yet we had to be satisfied with an occasional glimpse of an exiguous maillot with nobody inside it.
In fact, the fun throughout had a note of reserve and was never boisterous. Mr. Jack Buchanan's quiet methods in the part of the Hon. Bill Malcolm, universal philanderer, lent themselves to this quality of understatement. In a scene where he tried to extricate himself from a number of coincident entanglements with various members of the Club he was quite amusing without the aid of italics. Mr. Gilbert Childs, again, as Weekes—Club porter and Admirable Crichton of the island—though a little broader in his style, was too clever to force the fun.
The other sex, as was natural with women who affected a serious purpose, had fewer chances, and Miss Phyllis Monkman spoilt hers by a bad trick of hunching her shoulders and waggling her arms as if she were out for a cake-walk on Montmartre.
There were touches of humour in Mr. Cuvillier's tuneful music and in the limited movements of the best-looking chorus that I have seen for a long time.
As for the plot, it had at least the merit of continuity and conformed to the logic, seldom too severe, of this kind of entertainment, as distinct from the so-called revue. Nearly everything was well within my intelligence, the chief exception being the title; for never surely did a wild-goose chase offer such easy sport. The birds were just asking to be put into the bag. I should myself have preferred, out of compliment to the chorus, to call the play "Wild Ducks," only, of course, Ibsen had been there before. Not that this would have greatly troubled an author who showed so little regard for the proprietary rights of Aristophanes and Sir James Barrie.
O.S.