STAGE AND SCREEN
"Busman's Honeymoon." By Dorothy L. Sayers and M. St. Clare Byrne. At the Comedy—" Curse It, Foiled Again ! " At the Little
Two entertainments could hardly be less alike superficially than Busman's Honeymoon and Curse It, Foiled Again ! The former, being up to date and about a brutal murder, is called "a new detective comedy," while the latter, bur- lesquing an old play preoccupied with alcoholic abuse, is termed sensational drama with music." Yet the two are sisters under their skin ; they belong to the same family of Melodrama.
The first being the work of Miss Dorothy Sayers, in colla- boration with Miss M. St. Clare Byrne, has a brilliantly intricate plot that works out with almost too mathematical a neatness. The celebrated Lord Peter Wimsey has now married the famous Harriet, and the two have come to honeymoon in an old house whose cellar yields a fresh corpse even before the pair have sat down to eat their first married dinner. The one thing hard to understand about this lucid puzzle of a play is the pair's odd shrinking from the discovery of crime on the premises. Surely a male and a female geologist on honeymoon would both be delighted to stumble upon trilobites in the Dolomites ? And surely this aristo- cratic detective and his lady-novelist with criminological bent should not stand aghast at the discovery in the cellar and seriously ask each other if they are never to escape from cr:me and its punishment ?
However, this unlikely moment quickly passes and there is no further improbability except a quantity of that rapid detective cross-talk which Miss Sayers imagines will come off as well in a theatre as in a yellow-jacketted novel. Thanks to the handsome adroitness of Mr. Dennis Arundell and Miss Veronica Turleigh it very nearly does, and at least as well as their serious love scenes which are strewn with quotations from Donne and other fashionable classics.
The most likely suspects are the village policeman who has been blackmailed by the dead man, the nervous spinster who should inherit his fortune, and the stop-at-ribthing young gardener to whom he owed certain moneys. The last, since he is the least likeable, is most under suspicion, since we have now travelled a long way past the detective-drama days when it was safe to assume that the most innocent-eyed character was the culprit. One can reveal no more in the present matter since, despite its unorthodox intellectual airs accompanied by highly orthodox comic relief, the piece depends on a last-act surprise and on spotting a criminal and the method of his crime. It is not perhaps unfair to intimate to intending playgoers that the nefarious instrument whose nature so much puzzles the people on the stage is as plain as the nose on the audience's face right from the rise of the curtain. And it would be quite unfair' not to give special praise to Miss Christine Silver for her hariOsfing insight into the nervousness of the old maid who has thrown heart and senses away in favour of the-lusty brute who looks so like the criminal.
There are fewer tangles about the guyed melodrama at the Little. The heroine is fair and unfortunate, the hero curled and forgiving, and the villain, who is fell and dark, strokes a sleek moustache. With their plot is intermingled that of an engine-driver, the heroine's father, who is torn between the temptations of the rum-bottle in the tavern and the cocoa-cup at home. Cocoa wins in the end, but the struggle has been grim.
If one still has an ashamed regard for the dear, silly old
songs one's grandparents sang at one another, one will like less and less the manner in which Mr. Peter GOdfrey's produc- tion insistently mocks them. There were inany parts of the audience in which no cultured giggling Was to be heard during these solos and duets. "The whirligig of time brings in his revenges," and just as the villainons4tOking proves after all to be the villain in the ultra-modern melodranaa, so we may be coining very soon to realise that -there are More deplorable things in the world than the sentimentality of the old. The playing is lively, but Mr. Fred O'Donovan, through-giving the drunkard a minute of sincerity and serious acting, very _nearly brought the whole precarious . joke to the ground..
Ai s DENT,
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