THEATRE .
Both Ends Meet. By Arthur Macrae. (Apollo.)—After the Ball. By Noel Coward. (Globe.) INCOME tax is a sort of wild justice. Yearly tax returns serve to remind us that a vast and arbitrary power is hovering. "We are babes in his horny hand." So the Romans were accustomed to have a skull present at their most sumptuous banquets and in these days the words 'final notice' make momento 7//0/*/ comparatively innocuous. Arthur Macrae's new play is about a series of tussles with the dragon. What does a revue writer do when an official of the inland revenue actually proposes to marry into his family and when he, unaware of the young man's occupation, has given away the tax evasions practised by friends, when the family solicitor has also given away his own and his partner's tax evasions? Out of this fundamental situation Mr. Macrae manages to construct a very amusing play and the laughs come fast and furious on the appearance of Alan Webb and Miles Malleson as two fruity old aristocrats concerned to extract from the writer money which they had given to his great-aunt in return for services rendered in the gay Edwardian days and which had been left in turn to him. The trick by which he eventually gets rid of them will be by anyone who sees the play and there is no need to give it away here. The comedy is sustained right up to the end and, as might be expected, everything turns out happily. Tom Davenport even manages to find him- self a tax accountant from an unexpected source.
This frolic is acted with great verve and speed by an experienced cast. Mr. Macrae himself plays Davenport and makes of him a very nervous writer indeed. Brenda Bruce is charming as his girl friend and Jane Downs as his niece. Richard Easton is a pleasantly nave employee of the Inland Revenue, while the comic peak of the evening is reached by Messrs. Malleson and Webb. This is a theme everyone has suffered and a play everyone will enjoy.
Lady Windermere's Fan is not really one of Oscar Wilde's best plays and Noel Coward's adaptation of it into a musical has not improved it. Of course, the material was intractable, oceans of dreary epigrams of the 'I love green; it's so yellow' variety hardly make a very suitable basis for Mr. Coward's own particular type of musical play, and the plot is involved and sentimental. It is, in fact, this sentimentality which is the undoing of After the Ball; as the bad woman is revealed to be a good woman we writhe uneasily in our seats to the cloying tones of music which is only too sweet and never bitter enough. Some of the songs are amusing (Mr. Hopper's Chanty, for example, and Oh, what a century it's been), but this is not enough to carry three acts. A little more wit, a little more vigour might have saved the situation. As it was, the cast had to do their
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