THE THEATRE
SERIOUS thoughts about the future of our stage are forced upon us by a visit to the exceptionally beautiful and successful Greenwich Village Follies of this year. In one way Mr Anderson turns toward the norm—there is less of literary sophistication than in previous years; in another he surpasses himself, for there is but one heavy set-piece, the Beethoven or somebody picture fading into and out of the drop; in a third he departs utterly from it, for his piece has virtually no rough and tumble humours.
He has, however, retained the magnificent Bert Savoy who sings the ballad of the Widow Brown with so swift and evanescent a charm as to make it quite poignant; and John E. Hazzard sings, against gorgeous "illusions" by Walter Hoban, a ballad almost as rich as Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl, and does it with unction. We have the feeling that we can see a thing like The Nightingale and the Rose almost anywhere, but the Krazy Kat Ballet which came and went and is now apparently not to be restored to the programme, we can see nowhere else. Two other items Mr Anderson offered: Fortunello and Cirillino, vaudeville talent at its best, and the singing of Yvonne George who is exquisite. Compared with the numbers I have mentioned the corps de ballet and even the loveliness of the general effect are quite quite secondary.
The Theatre Guild opened with that play of Karel Capek which was first mentioned in American in a recent Prague Letter in this journal. R. U. R. is far from being a great play; but it is an intensely interesting one, and like Liliom it shows how ideas can be dramatized and can keep audiences steadily interested and thrilled. To me it seemed that the Guild gave the play an almost perfect production—in décor, in acting, and in the inner harmony which has no name. I say almost because the cutting of the peroration flattened the ending terribly and because in the moment when the automaton Helena first experiences the shock of emotion the director permitted her to assume an attitude good in itself, but fatally reminiscent of musical comedy tenderness. The exact shade of the uncanny, the exciting, and the terrifying was given to the Robots; the relations of human beings to Robots and to each other were
