Theatre

Empire at the Globe
MY EDUCATION has obviously been sadly neglected, for I had never seen Dr Evadne Hinge and Dame Hilda Bracket. My visit to the Globe Theatre last week made up for the deficiency — and how wonderfully. "Hinge and Bracket" have come to Shaftesbury Avenue and will undoubtedly stay there for a very long time.
I cannot remember when I laughed so much, or for that matter, when I saw an audience in such convulsions of merriment.
Drag, well done, is amusing. Danny La Rue was the first to blaze the way in a spectacular fashion, and Dame Edna Everidge became an overnight success, but if I had to choose the funniest it would be Dr Hinge and Dame Hilda Bracket.
I doubt whether. I shall ever be able to see a Last Night of the Proms again, and hear a contralto sing "Land of Hope and Glory", without recalling Hilda Bracket's rendering of it. As in the case of the Albert Flail, the audience joined in the singing — that is when the laughter allowed them to do so. If that item had been the finale, I doubt whether the audience would have allowed the two performers to go home.
Go to the Globe, forget the recession, and have a hilarious night out.
The musical version of Dion Boucicault's "The Streets of London", might have been a similar experience, but it did not come off I did not see it when it was in the East End at the Theatre Royal, Stratford, but suspect that it suited its atmosphere better than it does Her Majesty's.
It needs a very special abandonment by the actors and a relationship with the audience that used to exist at the Players' Theatre, and which "The Good Old Days" has inherited.
At the Cambridge Theatre Joan Collins repeats the excellent performance she gave earlier this year at Chichester, in Lonsdale's "The Last of Mrs Cheyney". I recommended it wholeheartedly then and I have not changed my mind,