AT THE PLAY.
"Felix gets a Month."
BORROWED PLUMES IN A MAYOR'S NEST.
Alderman Twentyman . Mr. O.B. Clarence.
Felix Delany . . . Mr. Gordon Ash.
This "whimsical comedy," made by Mr. Leon M. Lion out of a novel by the late Tom Gallon, began in a distinctly intriguing mood. Felix had an uncle, a sport, on whom he had once played a scurvy practical joke. This highly tolerant victim eventually cut up for a round million, which he left to nephew Felix on condition that he should enter Umberminster as naked as the day he was born and earn his living therein for a full calendar month—a palpable posthumous hit to the old man. Felix accordingly, equipped as laid down in the will, is left by the family solicitor in a wood, and, after a night and a day in hiding, appears shivering at the Mayor's parlour window, abstracts a rug for temporary relief, and prevails upon the maid, a romantic little orphan (who had been reading about river-gods and mistakes Felix for one), to borrow a suit of the Mayor's clothes—into which he gets in time to interview that worthy when he returns with his grim lady. "You'll get a month," says she with damnable iteration; and the resourceful Felix, with an eye to the whimsical will, whimsically suggests that justice would be better fulfilled by his putting in the month at the Mayor's house as odd-job man than by his being conveyed to the county jail. And the Mayor whimsically agrees.
After that, I regret to say, honest whimsicality took wing, and the show became merely—shall we say?—eupeptic. And certainly a much more elaborate meal than my lord Devonport allowed me would be required to induce a mood sufficiently tolerant to face without impatience the welter which followed. The three incredible people—mercenary virgin, heavy father and aimless smiling villain—that walked straight out of the Elephant and Castle into the Second Act were not, I suspect, any elaborate (and quite irrelevant) joke of the actor-author's at the expense of the transpontine method, but just queer puppets brought on to disentangle the complications, though I confess I half thought that the villain, Mr. Lawrence Leyton, was pulling our legs with a quite deliberate burlesque. On the whole I am afraid this play is but another wreck on that old snag of the dramatised novel.
But there were plenty of isolated good things, such as Mr. O.B. Clarence's really excellent Mayor, puzzled, pompous, eagle-pecked. Miss Florence Ivor, the eagle in question, gave a shrewd and shrewish portrait of a wife gey ill to live with. Mr. Reginald Bach's very entertaining imaginary portrait of a faithful boy scout was a stroke of genius, his "call of the wild" being by far the best whim of the evening. Miss Eva Leonard-Boyne as Ninetta, the orphan, did her little job tenderly and prettily, but I couldn't believe in Ninetta in that galley, and I doubt if she did. Mr. Gordon Ash was the debonair hero. I do most solemnly entreat him to consider the example of some of the elders in his profession who have adopted a laugh as their principal bit of business. It may turn into a millstone. Was he not laughing the same laugh on this very stage in a very different part three days ago? He was. If he got a month, laugh-barred, he would profit by the sentence. For he has jolly good stuff in him.
T.
More Commandeering.
From a report of the Prime Minister's speech at Carnarvon:—
"There are eight million houses in this country. Let us have VICTORY GUM FACTORY, Nelson, Lancs."—Daily Dispatch.
But surely he does not want to be known as "The Stickit Minister."
"A grocer in a London suburb complains that on Saturday he and his staff were 'run o ffthei rlegs by the extraordinary demands of customers.'"—Westminster Gazette.
We congratulate the printer on his gallant effort to depict the situation.
"Wanted, Cook Generals, House Parlourmaids; fiends might suit."—Irish Paper.
Discussion of the eternal servant problem is apt to be one-sided; it was quite time that we heard from the advocatus diaboli.