AT THE PLAY.
"THE POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL."
EMERSON says somewhere that there are great ways of borrowing; that, if you can contrive to transmute base metal into fine, nobody will worry as to where you got your base metal from. But, when it is the other way about, I think you must not be surprised if people ask you where you lifted your gold. And the answer, in the case of Miss ELEANOR GATES, is that the nuggets were the property of LEWIS CARROLL. She has taken the sprightly and fantastic humour of Alice in Wonderland, passed it through the alembic (if that is the word) of her American imagination, and the result is something that hardly lets you smile at all. It is not a typical product of native industry, but even that does not make it much easier for us to grasp the secret of its success over there. It would seem that nearly all Transatlantic humour, indigenous or adoptive, is apt, like certain wines, to suffer in the process of sea-transit.
WITH THE "TELL-TALE FOREST" HUNT.
The Hobby Rider (Mr. CHERRY) takes the temperature of The Poor Little Rich Girl (Miss STEPHANIE BELL).
The hound is Mr. ERNEST HENDRIE (The Man who makes Faces), well-known as The Dog in The Blue Bird.
Her "Poor Little Rich Girl" is poor because her parents are too rich. Her father is too busy with finance and her mother with social climbing to spare time for their daughter's company, so they leave her to the care of governesses and menials. Her nurse, anxious for an evening out at a picture-palace, gives the child an overdose of sleeping-mixture, with the result that she nearly dies of it. In the course of delirious dreams she finds herself in the "Tell-Tale Forest" (which threatens to recall The Palace of Truth), and here all the picturesque phrases which she has been in the childish habit of misinterpreting in their literal sense—"a bee in the bonnet," to "ride hobbies," "to play ducks and drakes," "to pay the piper," and so forth—are realised in human or animal form. With these are mixed the familiar figures of her waking life, all of them exposed in their true characters so that you can distinguish the devotion of the doctor (who now appears in pink because he likes riding hobbies) and the affection of the teddy-bear (now expanded to human proportions) from the serpentine nature of the governess and the double-faced dealings of the nurse. Her father, who is a stranger to her, comes on dressed in banknotes and chained to a safe; her mother, also a stranger, wears a society bee which buzzes in the place where her bonnet would have been; and five samples of the fashionable world, where, as you know, everybody thinks the same thing at the same time, let off recitatives from time to time in unison. And there was much talk about "Robin Hood's Barn," a thing I was never told about at an age when I am sure it would have given me sincere pleasure.
Here and there the symbolism was obvious to the point of crudity; but you searched in vain for a consistent scheme. The father in his banknotes lashed to a ponderous safe was an easy personification of the slavery of wealth, and the pantomime ducks and drakes were simple to understand as symbolizing the career of a spendthrift (though the father was never that); but why, you asked, did the double-faced nurse exhaust all her spare moments and our patience pirouetting about the stage? Did she represent the levity of the dual life? Not at all; her actions bore no moral significance: she was just giving a literal illustration of a phrase—"to dance attendance."
I don't know how the children in the audience appreciated all this, but I confess that some of it left me wondering whether my intelligence was too raw or too ripe for the fancies of this Wonder-Zoo-Land.
The First Act, which showed the child's life at home, had fallen altogether flat; but the Third, in which she wakes in her pretty bedroom, restored from the jaws of death to her repentant parents, put us on better terms with ourselves, for we were not really hard to please. The sweetness of it was perhaps a little cloying, but it was all quite nice and sympathetic. Still, I am afraid I agreed more than I was meant to with the speech of pretty little Miss STEPHANIE BELL, when she told us before the curtain that they would cable to the author in America to say how glad we were that it was all over.
Mr. ERNEST HENDRIE, who was translated from an organ-grinder to a maker of faces, played very soundly, but seemed to me a little too deliberate and conscious in his speech. I found a more moving appeal in the slight pathetic sketch of an old faithful butler by Mr. GEORGE MALLETT. Mr. FEWLASS LLEWELLYN might easily, with a little assistance from the author, have extracted a lot more fun from his Plumber. Mr. MALCOLM CHERRY had a simple and popular part as the good Doctor. Miss HELEN HAYE'S cleverness was wasted on the character of a sinuous governess. Miss EVELYN WEEDEN did all that was asked of the mother in both worlds—the world of fancy and the world of fact. But, to speak truth, there was little attraction in the performance apart from the personality of Miss STEPHANIE BELL in the title rôle. If the play is to succeed—and its hope lies in the good temper and high spirits of holiday time—the author will owe most to the natural charm of this delightful young lady, who played throughout with a most engaging sincerity and ease.
O.S.
"After fifty years of good conduct in the Ancona Penitentiary, the life sentence of Giacomo Casale has been remitted by King Victor Emmanuel. Casale's astonishment at the altered world in which he found himself on coming out of prison was unbounded. He immediately"—Daily Express.
Unfortunately our contemporary stops there, and leaves us all in an agony of doubt. Our own view is that CASALE bought the Mimosa Edition of a certain rival journal, and that the Editor of The Express only just censored the paragraph in time.
"The wireless station at Kamina, in Togo, German West Africa, has received a number of wireless telegrams from the station at Naten, a distance of 3,348 miles. The Kamina station will not be able to reply until its new plant, which is being set up with the utmost speed, has been completed."—Reuter.
Indeed, the opinion is held by some that it would be quicker to reply by post.
"The prison buildings themselves are separated from this wall by a yard measuring twenty-five years across."—Daily Dispatch.
Of course a yard ought to measure thirty-six inches.
English Horse Dealer (to Irish horse dealer from whom he is buying a horse). "HOW'S HE BRED?"
Irish Dealer. "WELL, HOW WOULD YE LIKE HIM BRED? IF HE WAS FOR SIR PATHRICK UP AT THE CASTLE HE'D BE BY RED EAGLE OUT AV AN ASECTIC MARE, BUT YE CAN SUIT YERSILF."