"Treasure Hunt." By M. J. Farrell and John Perry. (Apollo.)
BANG in the middle of the drawing-room of Anglo-Irish Ballyroden is Aunt Anna Rose's sedan chair, and there, at its window, is Aunt Anna Rose herself, now imagining that she has pulled the communica- tion cord of the Orient Express, now ready to alight from her transatlantic air-liner. Feeble-mindedness, one would have said, is never funny, but here are two talented authors and a player of genius to prove one wrong, for Aunt Anna Rose has been given the most aptly inept lines and Dame Sybil Thorndike speaks them as though they had been spread with honey, and by the light of the moon.
Ballyroden is down to its last bottle of champagne and cut off by poverty from even Irish race-meetings. Aunt Anna Rose is on the side—if only she would stop, for a moment, going round the world— of the charming youngsters who see English P.G.s as the answer, and ready, in her deliciously unto-ordinated way, to spike the guns of tetchy Uncle Hercules and selfish Aunt Consuelo, who want the bubbly and biscuits without the boarders. But the boarders come, are flirted with—not least by Aunt Anna Rose—and go. Some long- lost rubies come to light, and some genuinely Irish players bring in trays and unpaid accounts, all the while that Mr. Alan Webb, as Uncle Hercules, stumps, chunners, grizzles and growls, and Miss Marie Lohr, as Aunt Consuelo, plots and flounces. These are two beautiful performances in what, without acting of this quality, and direction such as Mr. Gielgud's, must be the flimsiest of farces. But even these are outshone by Dame Sybil, as decorative and as absurd as those castles of spun sugar the pastrycooks used to make, but living, lovable and enormously to be laughed at.
CYRIL RAY.
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