IT DEPENDS WHAT YOU MEAN AN Army padre organises some good clean fun for a camp in " North Britain " by way of a Brains Trust of local talent. " No politics or religion and no mis-timed facetiousness." Everything should be set for an instructive evening, sparkling, here and there, with clerical jests. Unfortunately, a persistent A.T.S. driver who wants to know if marriage is to be recommended precipitates a domestic crisis in public among the Brains Trusters who give, to the padre's increasing horror, the brutal and ever more brutal truth.
This comedy by James Bridie though it hardly develops and the solution of the dim triangular problem by the Cockney soldier is, though commonsense also unfortunately commonplace, the comedy remains taut all through and very funny. Mr. Bridie's ideas are many and intelligent and there is a company of players headed by Alastair Sim as the padre to make the very best of them, Angela Baddelcy looks, talks and dresses exactly as one of the nicer less intelligent members of the intelligentsia would look, talk and dress; and Nona Davey exquisitely avoids any trace of caricature in her part of a dog-loving, husband-indulging viscountess which so easily might have become just hard burlesque.—(Westminster.) T.
DAUGHTER JANIE AMER1CAN adolescents have a zest for life; their opposite numbers in this country feign boredom. You can get an evening's entertainment out of a bunch of bounding, jitterbugging schoolgirls but you can't out of blase young people who hide their enthusiasms under a cloak of under-statement. That explains why London's West End has got Daughter manic and why no play about British youngsters has ever got to Broadway.
As to the ethics of the play—that is another matter altogether. No brief can be held for the fret-for-all necking parties. What saves them from being too sickening is the speed of the play's action and the relentless and continuous intrusion of the Awful Child in the person of Betty Blackler who as relentlessly and continuously breaks up the petting parties before they get really
going.—(ApoUo.) G. C.