AT THE PLAY.
"The Dragon."
Some day, no doubt, plays like Mr. Wu and The Dragon (by R. E. Jeffrey) will be forbidden by the League of Nations. Meanwhile let us allow ourselves to be diverted by the motiveless villainies of crooked cruel "Chinks" like Wang Fu Chang, who sold opium at a terrific profit in Mayfair, hung his servants up by their thumbs and belonged to a Society of Elder Brethren, as to whose activities we were given no clue, unless indeed their job was the kidnapping of Younger Sisters for Wicked Mandarins.
For Jack Stacey, who opened the Prologue in Loolong with head in hands and moaned invocations of the Deity (a version doubtless of the well-known gambit, "'Hell!' said the Duchess"), had his little daughter kidnapped at birth or thereabouts (by Wang Fu, as it happened), and never saw her again till, after eighteen years of opium-doping—between the Prologue and the First Act—he called upon the same Wang Fu (just before dinner) with a peremptory message from a very bad and powerful mandarin that if little Miss Che Fu were not packed off to China by eleven that same evening the Elder Brethren would be one short by midnight. Che Fu, I ought to say, passed as Wang's daughter, but was so English, you know, to look at that nobody could really believe it.
THE MODEL FLAPPER (Chinese style).
Wang Fu ChangMr. D.L. Mannering.
Che FuMiss Christine Silver.
Of course Jack didn't recognise her as his own daughter, but equally of course we did, and knew that she would be rescued by her impetuous boy-lover and restored to her real father; but not before great business with opium pipes, pivoting statues of goddesses, inoperative revolvers, gongs, strangulations (with gurgles), detectives, rows of Chinese servants each more rascally (and less Chinese, if possible) than the last, and over all the polished villainy of the inscrutable Wang Fu Chang.
Mr. Jeffrey's technique was quite adequate for this ingenuous kind of thing. He achieved what I take to be the supreme compliment of noisy hushings sibilated from the pit and gallery when the later curtains rose. Perhaps action halted a little to allow of rather too much display of pidgin-English and (I suppose) authentic elementary Chinese and comic reliefs which filled the spaces between the salient episodes of the slender and naïve plot. I couldn't help wondering how Jack Stacey, whom we left at 10.45 in a horrible stupor, shut away in a gilded alcove of Wang Fu's opium den, could appear at 11.30 at Lady Handley's in immaculate evening dress and with entirely unruffled hair, having in the meantime cut down and restored to consciousness two tortured Chinese and heard the true story of his daughter's adventures. This seems to be overdoing the unities. And I wondered whether the puzzled look on young Handley's face was due to this same wonder or to the reflection that if he had shed one undesirable father-in-law he had let himself in for another. For, needless to say, they had all met in the famous opium scene when Stacey was naturally not at his best.
Mr. D. Lewin Mannering was suitably sinister as Wang Fu; Mr. Tarver Penna's Ah Fong, the heroine's champion, made some very pleasant faces and gestures and was less incurably Western than some of his colleagues; Mr. Cronin Wilson's Jack Stacey seemed a meritorious performance. The part of Che Fu made no particular demand on Miss Christine Silver's talent, and Miss Evadne Price faithfully earned the laughter she was expected to make as Sua Se, the opium-den attendant. Leave your critical faculty at home and you will be able to derive considerable entertainment from this unambitious show.
T.
Fashions in Hand-wear.
"Amusing contrast is seen in the Riviera and winter sports outfits now on view, with filmy lace, shimmering silks, and glowing velvets on the one hand and thick wool and the stoutest of boots on the other."
Weekly Paper.
From a feuilleton:—
"... She was startled by a low sibilant whisper, 'I've caught you, my girl!'"
Daily Paper.
Try and hiss this for yourself.