Quadrille. By Noel Coward. (Phoenix.) THE play's the thing, but
not when the Lunts are on the stage. It is then no more than an excuse, a scaffolding to be shoved up and covered with brocade, any old floorboarding under the rich carpet. The Lunts' theatre is the actor's theatre, not the playwright's, not the producer's, and the author serves them best who writes a play that makes no demand on the audience and distracts it not at all from the playing. That is the sort of play that Mr. Coward has put together : a sentimental period piece of not the slightest consequence which does its humble duty by the Lunts and allows Cecil Beaton to have a good time among the furnishings and fashions of the 'seventies. It was ungracious of some to suggest that this is not Coward at his best : I say, considering the end to which it is the means, that it is an excellent play—hardly, in fact, noticeable as a play at all. So the evening may be spent in carefree, single-minded admiration of the way in which Alfred Lunt instantly, constantly, infallibly transmutes the pale, heavy lead of text into pure gold of voice and gesture. He is a bearded bearish Yankee railway-king : his voice pushes back the limits of expanding America ; his hands mould the Rocky Mountains ; his boots are seven-leaguers. But, no rough diamond ever glittered with more premeditated care. See how, not at home but neither for that matter ill-at-ease in Belgravia, he fiddles with his coffee-cup, turning it upside-down on his saucer. The smallest piece of business has been hand-made and tested, as the engineers say, almost to destruction, before it is fit for the public's eye. So with Lynn Fontanne : her fabulous modulations could turn a leading article in The Times into a sweet litany ; and the burden of her husband's masterly bearishness sets off her own high- comic strokes, as a real live Marchioness, to perfection. As I say, Mr. Coward ensures that we are not distracted from pure enjoyment of this virtuosity ; from the first scene we know, without being troubled to think, exactly what is to happen : how this railroad king and the Marchioness will pursue their runaway spouses and in the pursuit fall in love ; how, in the second scene of a long third act, the quadrille will be openly acknowledged as the romantic pas-de- deux that it has really been from the beginning. On second thoughts, though, Mr. Coward might have provided a climax worthy of the name. It would have done no harm. IAIN HAMILTON.
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