Miss Helen Faucit has succeeded Miss Cushman as the tragic
"star" of the Haymarket, and reappeared on Monday in the play with which above all others she is identified—The Lady of Lyons. A little farce, called Only a Halfpenny, has been brought out at the same theatre. It is a trifle among trifles ; turning on the incident of a gentleman scraping ac- quaintance with a lady on the strength of a halfpenny he has advanced to her in order to make up a deficient omnibus-fare, and on this slight foundation raising a superstructure of courtship. The humour of the situ- ation arises from the combination of ardent love and a determination to enforce the very small claim in one and the same person ; for the more the gentleman worships his fair debtor, the more does he feel necessitated to insist on the obligation which alone gives him a right to an interview. Whether this French pleasantry contains in itself enough to satisfy a London audience we very much question ; but Mr. Buckstone, by making the hero a type of a modern school of English fop, familiar to the carica- turist but new to the stage, endows him with a reality never contem- plated by the prolific MM. Clairville and Lambert Thiboust, when they wrote the Hietoire d'un Sou for the Palais Royal.
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