"Doctor's Orders." Adapted by Harry Graham from "La Femme Ravie.
' By Louis Verneuil. At the Globe.
KIDNAPPING, for long an established industry in America and the more civilized parts of China, supplies the theme of this play. Masked men—endowed with that phenomenal strength which we have learnt to expect from all masked men—carry Mrs. Lorimer swiftly through the French windows of an other- wise insular home in Hampstead, and she finds herself a prisoner in baronial halls whose whereabouts remain a tanta- lizing mystery. Who is responsible for this outrage ? None other, it turns out, than Dr. Maclean, that shy but charming friend of her husband's, whose aversion from talking shop it is now so easy for all of us to understand ; and this scoundrel, who entered the profession as a dog-thief and worked his way up through race-horses to the relations of the rich, is demanding a quarter of a million pounds before he returns Mrs. Lorimer to her wealthy but otherwise unattractive husband.
The ransom is forthcoming. But Dr. Maclean suspends negotiations, having fallen in love with his prey ; and though she rejects him with a proper indignation, her heart has been touched. Rescue, when it comes, seems to her a shade less providential than it should, and she finds security in Hampstead, which is now all burglar alarms and no excur- sions, insufferably irksome. Accordingly it comes as no sur- prise to us when Dr. Maclean, bold and bland as ever, walks off with her again through cordons of police.
In this play, as a matter of fact, there is hardly anything which does come as a surprise to us. It is done pleasantly, but it has all been done before. Its characters and situations are not, and do not pretend to be, credible, for this is a farcical comedy. Is, then, this trivial and fantasticated world suffi- ciently illumined by wit to interest and amuse us ? But for Miss Yvonne Arnaud, who of course plays Mrs. Lorimer, the answer would be No. But she—so deft and fresh is her playing, so unerring her attack, so firmly rooted in comedy on the one hand and in humanity on the other every gesture and every inflection—raises the trite, machine-made piece to the level of good, though not rare, entertainment. In this she receives able support from Mr. Raymond Massey, though he could afford to give it less unostentatiously, for Dr. Maclean emerges as a rather pale and uncertain figure, lacking (and not alto- gether through the author's fault) that dash which is the birth-
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