STAGE AND SCREEN
THE THEATRE The Man Who Came to Dinner." At the Savoy Theatre.
Tills is a play about pseudo-celebrities—those unreal celebrities of the contemporary world forced by blatant publicity upon an ignorant and gullible public as the genuine article. Of the two American authors, Mr. George S. Kaufman is the better known here and he may well have intended to hold up a mirror to the degenerate idiocies of present-day " fame " but if his comedy was intended as a satire it misses the mark completely, for it never suggests for one moment that its hero in his cunning base- ness does not deserve the celebrity he enjoys, or that there is any sort of solid, more enduring value, unattainable by such a man, to which the word " fame " properly attaches. No, on the con- trary, the familiar, the much advertised names of Hollywood and the entertainment world are shouted, telephoned and tele- graphed all over the stage as if it were most natural that a man of great reputation in some artistic or scientific field (the precise nature of Mr. Sheridan Whiteside's genius is not indicated) would be on convivial terms with these ephemerae of a day.
Just as the monotonous notoriety of Mr. Whiteside's friends and his own trumpeting aggressiveness have begun to show signs of exhausting even his impersonator's, Mr. Robert Morley's un- common vocal powers, this " comedy " breaks into uproarious farce, and at least enables one occasionally to laugh. The fall of the curtain is a release to the full blast of that accumulating depression which sets in after prolonged forced gaiety. The production is of the compelling prestissimo pace practised by those expert in all the tricks by which " presentation " is sub- stituted for simple and genuine art and acquiescence is wrung out of you by a process that can only be described as mangling most of your five senses. Mr. Robert Morley does not have the stage to himself physically, but he almost has it vocally. It would be superfluous to mention the rest of the cast.
W. J. TURNER.
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