CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THEATRE
The Apples of Eve. By Allen Berthal. (Comedy.) " Doctor, have you got a hypodermic ? " ." Yes, of courser " OF course the doctor has a hypodermic. This, truly, is a coming to the point. Let me assure you that in the theatre, if not on this page, there is an austere, even a classical, air of inevitability .about this brief passage of dialogue. The question has been observed to approach : the answer is predestined. The audience, like watchers of a familiar ritual, demands only the clear and measured expression of both. It is received with relief and a sense of fulfilment ; for only now can those celebrants, the players, tear from the mystery the last transparent veil. This, I feel, ought to be performed to the . tolling of a bell. But to return to an earlier question : " Who killed Mrs. Rankin ? "—for that person, the superintendent of a rest-home for neurotic w6men, has been found murdered. It might have been any of her patients : Ann Saunders, a trim widow ; Jean Healy, a sourplum spinster from Manchester • Sylvia Loraine, a trapeze-artiste of marvellous muscles ;„ Louise Lanser, a handsome creature who enjoys the delusion (like a 'great many people outside mental homes) that she is a famous writer ; Lady Helen Duns- borough, a dipsomaniac of high degree. It might even have been Mrs. Adams, the dead woman's aged, defeated and flat-footed mother. Or Betty Brooks, the cheery char. The author has con- veniently arranged for the exhibition of these characters one by one, and, since every jilt of them is played by Miss Florence Desmond, any feelings of discomfort that may be roused by the creaking of the plot are pleasantly soothed away by the thought of Miss Desmond changing like mad with half-a-second to spare and entering on cue and anew. Seven characters in search of an actress have found one well able to keep them in their respective places. Miss Desmond is not the sort of impressionist of whom it may be said that the more she changes the more she is the same thing. IAIN HAMILTON.
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