The Portmadoc Players played their triple bill to a full
house at their matinee on Tuesday at the Lyric, Hammer- smith. The chief quality of their performance was to me atmospheric. It was delightful to move in the world that they succeeded in evoking and to see rise in those incanta- tional North Welsh accents the whole circumstance of Welsh village life, the old women with their clogs and woollen tippets, the ugly hard granite villages, the- min-soft colours of the mountains,- and the droning of some pious harmonium in a well-varnished chapel.
Mr. Francis's play, The Poacher, was a deft, amusing piece of work and was played with the greatest success and aplomb by these amateurs. The Man Born to be Hanged and Cloud- break, though less immediately successful, were more interest- ing, both as being the work of members of the company and as being more original in conception. Cloudbreak is,
indeed, a moving story, and its telling is thoroughly fresh and original.
Mr. Richard Hughes and the rest of the company are greatly to be congratulated upon the outcome of this the first. considerable step towards the firm establishment of a company obviously capable of great developmeni. There
seems no reason why in time this company should not rival
the Abbey Theatre of happy fame. TARN.
[We deal with Mr. Shaw's Back to Methuselah on page 820.]
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