The Play

"COmus" Keeps
Eternal Youth
in Regents Park
The highly stylised, hot-house plant, Comus, which John Milton, Puritan, wrote for the pleasure and purge of a Cavalier court of butterfly romantics, flourishes with new life under rough zephyrs of Regents Park and among the proletarian, realistic audiences of the 20th century.
Although its formula construction and its tricks of •conversation--shepherds make speeches like poet-orators and lost maidens discourse like philosophers—date the work, Comus has eternal youth from its poetry. The Open Air Theatre production wisely relies upon its language to give effect rather than upon its low-geared drama, and it marches to its conclusion in a simple mood of ritual simplicity.
Individual performers are difficult to comment upon when the tone of a production must he kept at a level quietness, but Leslie French subones a Puckish spirit to the more sombre temperament of the Attendant Spirit, and if Fay Compton finds it hard to look the part of a lonely maiden desperately lost, it is 'because her lines turn her instantly into a hermit-philosopher whom worldly troubles touch not.
More important than particular interpretations is that sense, possessed by all the members of the cast, of the rich overladen, perfumed, baroque, beauty of Milton's lines.
Preceding Comus is a new ballet Pyramide, presented by Nini Theilade and her company who showed much spritliness and grace. But ballet is not a garden plant, and Pyramide is less effective than the hand-in-hand meadow fling of a group of peasant dancers in Comes.
I. C.
National Road Book, Vol. H. East Anglia and East Midlands, by R. T. Lang
(Methuen, 10s. (id.) This is the second volume out of a proposed quintet of guides which will then cover England. The first volume got itself the name of The Good Companion of the Road, and the second one merits the same epithet. These books do their work thoroughly,