CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THE THEATRE
"Little Lambs Eat Ivy." By Noel Langley. (Ambassadors.)
LADY SUCKERING has those characteristics which on the stage are usually associated with the Irish. She is impulsive, improvident and charming, untidy, resourceful and broke. A client simul- taneously—well, contemporaneously, anyhow—of the pawnbrokers and the most expensive hairdressers, she divides, during the action of this play, her energies between trying to pay the rent of her house near Regent's Park and disentangling the emotional destinies of her daughters. These number four. One is being delivered of twins upstairs, a circumstance prqductive of many hearty laughs ; the other three use their mother's drawing-room as a sort of Casualty Clearing Station for broken hearts. The pace is terrific.
Mr. Noel Langley is a wit and a craftsman. He has taken—from, I fancy, one of his earlier novels—a formula which, if it is com- petently handled, seldom fails in the West End theatre: the study of domestic crisis in an upper middle-class household. Lady Buckering belongs, really, to those early comedies of Mr. A. A. Milne. Her milieu has undergone the dilapidation necessary to bring it up to date ' • the French windows, the white flannels, the tinkling tea- things and the two-seaters have gone, but the austerity which, has curtailed and crumpled the chintzes has not blurred the dazzling way- ward patina of Lady Buckering's charm. Subsidiary ingredients are equally familiar. There is a perfectly beastly intellectual, a loyal old friend of the family, a green baize door from which more or less comical domestics emerge and a scene in which the youngest daughter is tipsy.
Mr. Langley makes the very best of this far from original material. His dialogue is consistently, and his situations are often, extremely amusing, and the animation of his puppets is so brisk that we do not require them to correspond to anything in life, and are, indeed, faintly embarrassed when from time to time they make a tentative pass at reality. An adequate and well-drilled cast is led with great intelligence and distinction by Miss Joan Haythorne as Lady Buckering and Mr. Lionel Murton displays a genuine gift for comedy as the less exotic of her sons-in-law.
PETER FLEMING.
Previous page
