"The Blind Goddess." By Patrick Hastings. (Apollo.)
STATELY, noiseless, unswerving and obsolete, like a paddle-steamer with her engines stopped, the venerable butler glides into Sir John Dering's study, carrying a tray and embodying the strength—and also, as it happens, the weakness—of this conventional but entertain- ing play. We soon realise that the bandage which covers the eyes of Justice is made of fustian ; but we do not greatly care, for it is pre-austerity material, woven (I suppose one does weave fustian?) with great dexterity in the old style. None of the half-measures which play so large a part in the nature and affairs of man are allowed to interfere with our enjoyment of—or to strengthen our belief in—the cause célèbre which 'Sir Patrick Hastings has put upon the stage. The villain is a V.I.P., his wife is a viper, the hero is an ass and the heroine has corn-gold hair ; in the Lord Chief Justice's Court sensation follows sensation with the speed, the éclat and the precision of tracer bullets ; and in the last act a prefabricated happy ending, engineered not very plausibly with the help of the butler, brings the blind goddess arbitrarily into her own.
It is all unpretentious old-fashioned entertainment. Mr. Basil Radford makes a capital K.C. and Mr. Wyndham Goldie an im- peccable villain. The rest of the cast do well enough, but Mr. Charles Hickman's production of the trial scene failed by an un- necessarily wide margin to recapture the atmosphere of the Law
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