Berlin isn't up to himself, except in one number, Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil, and that is borrowed in theme from Sweet Angelina. The use of the material, however, is so beautiful that the borrowing is justified.
In the way of production, production, and nothing but, The World We Live In is a triumph. Nothing so convinces me of the utter banality of the stage as its most effective scenes; for in one of them we have the war-lord of the ants interrupting a prayer to God in order to send another regiment to destruction and this is not only effective, it is actually good! It's exactly the sort of thing one meets in the arts and dismisses with a laugh; it isn't exactly what is accomplished in Gulliver's Travels, where the simplification is the same, but the method infinitely more delicate. In place of delicacy the production of this play (it is the Capek Life of the Insect done over by Owen Davis, produced by Mr Brady, with chief honours to Mr Lee Simonson for reproducing and adapting and departing from the original décor) set sheer skill. I have not been so made satisfied by the inner workings of the theatre for a long time.
Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author is another matter. The problem of production was exceptionally complicated, the solution became too involved with special bits of acting to be altogether clearly seen. But the play itself, once one got over the unilluminated programme note which accused Mr Pirandello of wondering whether the theatre was adequate to produce so commonplace a piece as the interior tragedy, was simplicity itself. That the semi-Scandinavian, semi-French tragedy out of which the Six Characters walked was only an excuse for the elaborate and wisely bewildering framework was, I should hope, obvious. It seemed to be so to the producer, at any rate.
The 49-ers added considerably to the unhappiness of the month. It is the sort of show which should always be talked about—it usually is—and never produced. Too late for verification comes the rumour that the show has much improved. By so much, then, it is good.
