AT THE PLAY.
"A Night Out."
Everybody except myself seems to recall the fact that the late farce of this name, adapted from L'Hôtel du Libre Echange, ran for five hundred nights before it expired. Some restorative music has now been applied to it and the corpse has revived. Indeed there are the usual signs of another long run. The trouble is that nearly all the cast at the Winter Garden Theatre seem to think that, if the play is to run, they must run too. They don't keep still for a moment, because they dare not. Even Mr. Leslie Henson, whose fun would be more effective if he didn't try so hard, feels that he must be at top pressure all the while with his face and his body and his words. Yet he could well afford to keep some of his strength in reserve, for he is a born humourist (in what one might perhaps call the Golliwog vein). But, whether it is that he underrates his own powers or that he can't contain himself, he keeps nothing in reserve; and the others, less gifted, follow his lead. They persist in "pressing," as if they had no confidence in their audience or their various authors or even themselves.
One is, of course, used to this with singers in musical comedy, who make a point of turning the lyrics assigned to them into unintelligible patter. Perhaps in the present case we lost little by that, though there was one song (of which I actually heard the words) that seemed to me to contain the elements of a sound and consoling philosophy. It ran something like this:—
For you won't be here and I won't be here
When a hundred years are gone,
But somebody else will be well in the cart*
And the world will still go on.
* Or, alternatively, soup.
Mr. Leslie Henson, as I have hinted, allowed himself—and us—no rest. His energy was devastating; he gave the audience so much for their money that in the retrospect I feel ashamed of not having paid for my seat. One's taste for him may need acquiring; but, once acquired, there is clearly no getting away from it. Perhaps his most irresistible moment was when he laid out six policemen and then meekly surrendered to a female constable who led him off by the ear.