As for the wit of "the clever ones"—Doris and her mother and her aunt—I don't know how the first-nighters took it, but when I was there a great deal of it (when audible) was over the heads of the audience. They understood all right the humour of things when somebody (not a clever one) said "Damn," but I wonder how many of them appreciated the symbolic force of the term épicier, or grasped the purport of Quem deus vult perdere prius dementat.
Mr. Sutro owed much to the excellence of his cast. Mr. Gerald du Maurier was, of course, inimitable; but there were also Miss Florence Haydon, Miss Mary Brough and Mr. Edmund Gwenn, all delightful in their own specialised veins of humour—the plaintive, the rich, the uproarious. But Mr. Holman Clark had not enough scope for his unique qualities.
I hear rumours of a revision, and hope that this means that I shall receive an invitation to renew a most delightful evening. For my only real criticism is that Mr. Sutro thought me more intelligent than I actually am—an error that I always encourage.
"Dusk."
Account Rendered, a comedy of some promise, but produced with an extraordinary inadequacy in the matter of what the programme called "the decors," has been very quickly withdrawn from the Little Theatre. But its curtain-raiser, Dusk, is to be retained for the revival of Magic.
That is nearly all that I have to say about Mr. Vansittart's "Oriental Fantasy." It deals with a youthful bride who has just been attached to a Persian hareem. In the garden at dusk she finds a young English traveller (who has just told us what a penchant he has for "women, women, women"—he is very insistent about this), and being caught in conversation with him is placed by her lord in a sack and consigned to the deep; but not before she has explained in fluent verse that in the circumstances this abrupt end to her young career has no terrors for her. But for this courageous attitude on her part I should have experienced greater relief when the hero appeared next morning in his pyjamas and indicated that the regrettable incident was a figment of his sleeping brain.
I thought I detected some good lines among the Englishman's remarks (though I did not like his voice), but I prefer to study poetical drama at leisure before attempting to pass any comment on it. I may add that I don't suppose that that engaging actor, Mr. Fred Lewis, has ever previously played the part of a Persian slave with a taste for philosophic recitation; and I hope he never will again, for, frankly, it is not his métier.
O. S.