I cannot praise too warmly the delightfully fantastic and inconsequent humour of the first half of the play. Often it was the things that Mr. Ainley was given to say; but even more often, I think, it was the incomparable way he said them, with those astonishingly swift and unforeseen turns of gesture and glance and movement which are his peculiar gift. Now and then, to remind us of his versatility, he may turn to sentiment or even tragedy, but light comedy remains his natural métier.
If I have a complaint to make it is that Uncle Ned's studied refusal to understand from an intimate woman-friend why it was that his elder niece, who had been privily married, "could no longer hide her secret" (the reticence of his friend was the sort of silly thing that you get in books and plays, but never in life) was perhaps a little wanton and caused needless embarrassment both to the young wife and to us. And one need not be very squeamish to feel that it was a pity to put into the lips of a mere child, a younger sister, the rather precocious comment that she makes on the inconvenience of a secret marriage. The humour of the play was too good to need assistance from this sort of titillation.
Mr. Randle Ayrton, as the plutocratic pachyderm, kept up his thankless end with a fine imperviousness; and Miss Irene Rooke, in the part of his secretary, played, as always, with a very gracious serenity, though I wish this charming actress would pronounce her words with not quite so nice a precision. Miss Edna Best was an admirable flapper, with just the right note of gaucherie.
As Mears, Mr. Claude Rains was not to be hampered by the methods dear to the detective of convention; he looked like an apache and behaved, rather effectively, like nothing in particular.
The Dawkins of Mr. G. W. Anson knew well the first duty of a stage-butler, to keep coming on whenever a stop-gap is wanted; but he had also great personal qualities, to say nothing of his astounding record of forty years' service in a house where strong liquor was only permitted for "medicinal" purposes.
O. S.
"The Young Person in Pink."
What the chair-man said about The Young Person in Pink who had been hanging about the Park every morning for a week was that nowadays you couldn't really tell. He thought on the whole she was all right. The balloon-woman was certain that with boots like that she must be a 'ussy; but then she had refused to buy a balloon. As a matter of fact she couldn't, being broke to the world. And worse. For she had arrived at Victoria Station unable to remember who she was or where she came from, ticketless, a few shillings in her purse. She had murmured "Season" at the barrier and had taken rooms at the Carlton because she had a queer feeling she had been there before. Her things had a coronet on them. The rest was a blank.
Of course nobody believed her; the women were scornful, the men not quite nice, till very young Lord Stevenage, the one that was engaged to a notorious baby-snatcher, Lady Tonbridge—in a high fever he'd unfortunately said "Yes"—meets her, and you guess the rest. No, you don't. You couldn't possibly guess Mrs. Badger, relict of an undertaker and now in the old-clothes line, who has social ambitions. (I must here say in parenthesis that Mrs. Badger is a double stroke of genius on the part both of Miss Jennings the author and of Miss Sydney Fairbrother. You don't know which to admire most, the things she says [Miss J.] or the way she says them [Miss S. B.]. Honours divided and high honours at that.)
Lady Tonbridge had advertised for a clergyman's widow to render some secretarial service, and the ambitious Mrs. Badger had applied, duly weeded. Meanwhile the elderly Lady T. had seen her fiancé and with the young person in pink, and it was a brilliant and base afterthought to bribe the clergyman's widow to claim the girl as her long-missing daughter (invented). Both the young Lord and the young person, too much in love perhaps to be critical, accept the situation; but you haven't quite got Mrs. Badger if you think she's the sort of person one would precisely jump at for a mother-in-law.