1 Theatre

Miss Courtneidge And The Pit
"LORD Essex be dammed, the pit rose to it," replied that ungernal genius Edmund Kean when his patient spouse asked him what the Director of Drury Lane Theatre thought of his Sir Giles Overreach. The observation was not polite; but it was pithed with a truth. Kean was a trouper; experience had taught him who were the important ones in his audience. They were in "the pit." Sometimes they rose; as often they rioted. So it was to the end. Indeed not Hazlitt, Hunt and posterity have paid him a finer tribute than theirs on that night while playing Othello for the last time, he collapsed, whispering, to the boards; when the manager of the theatre stepped before the curtain to tell them that Mr. Kean was dying, he found nothing but empty rows of seats. They had gone home, leaving Drury Lane to echo a little
longer with his voice. They bad passed judgment.
In the first and last analysis " the pit" is the significant contemporary critic; the others are, at best, historians.
In a happier setting, the other evening, I thought of this story of Kean when I saw the second-night pit rise to Miss Cicely Courtneidge. Correctly the critics had appraised
Her Excellency (HIPPODROME) as a
poor frame-work for the protean talent of this lovable buffoon. The music is thin; at best, it is derivative.
How, one asks, did a craftsman of musical comedy production like Mr. Hulbert, bring himself to believe he could get the best out of his admirable team of dancers on such fussy sets ? The book bears the same relationship to a good play, of its type, as Mr. Churchill's election addresses bear to his great wartime and European perorations. In attempting to be too popular it topples over into unreality; it be
comes vulgar in an embarrassing way. We expect better. Yet Miss
Courtneidge brought the show through to final victory. The pit rose and the critics, for her sake, were glad to be confounded.
Her secret is that, like Mr. Churchill, she is vital and she is English. We feel at home with her.
We respond to her wit; her vulgarity is normal, like the late Lord Loris dale's check suit, Giles' babies, Sunday papers, beer bottles naked on Hampstead Heath. and daft
jokes about mothers-in-law. She understands all classes and types of the English. Her good humoured
lady Ambassador is precisely the humanly justified suffragette; with her working class mother, her dancing daughter Flossie, her air traveller, sentimental, delicately raucous and discomfited, she strikes truly at each and all of us. She is a clown who pierces to the personal values of each member of her audience. She pokes fun at each, respects each and loves all. No one will dispute her place as our first lady of musical comedy; she might, were she not too kind and courteous, have echoed Kean. in relation to the critics, on Wednesday. She did not;
she thanked the pit. But the show, one insists, despite the good work of Mr. Thorley Walters, Mr. Patrick Barr, and that grand actor Mr. Austin Trevor. is not worthy of her and these good players. They fight, so to speak, on the beaches.
The Mollusc (Aars THEATRE) h a compact little Edwardian comedy
neatly constructed and easily justify ing, in laughter, its revival. Its theme is the weak woman strong enough to conscript all the talents, to the last drop of blood, of her relatives to the service of her soft pleasures and joy in idleness. Miss Vivienne Bennett gave this tarantula-butterfly a beauty and wit that always amused and decorated with out disguising the horrific aspects of the creation; Mr. Gordon Bell, Miss Jenny Laird and Mr, Patrick Waddington intelligently and pointedly abetted her.
At the Boltons, The Deluded offers the curiously conglomerated case-history of an ageing prostitute who enlivens her declining years by the exploitation of a young man's Oedipus complex, as she sips a nice cup of cocoa laced witb cocaine. Mr. Peter Madden's performance and a fine piece of creative acting by Miss Marian Spencer do not justify this production. Why, one wonders, did it happen? There are occasional flashes of intelligence from the script but the values, literary and humane, of the authoress are so mixed that the whole is well-nigh incomprehensible. The pit did not rise. With miraculous prescience it justified Kean. It stopped at home.
W. J. I.