THE marksmen are talented, the rate of fire leaves nothing
to be desired ; but some of the ammunition is not very good, and in the choice of targets there is a lack of ambition and perhaps also of the common touch. It is for the last two reasons that one comes away from a pleasant, highly civilised entertainment with a very slight feeling of deprivation. So many things begin well—a sketch about the Foreign Office, a ballad about the rich, a formula. for the sort of family play that Miss Dodie Smith and others write with such expertise; we settle down to enjoy them ; we do enjoy them. But we expected to enjoy them more ; the dish is never quite as good as the menu promised or the ingredients seem to guarantee. For all that it would be a great mistake to miss Penny Plain, for then you would never hear Miss Joyce Grenfell, as a very young lady up from the country, having a tete-a-tete soliloquy with an imaginary author, who although we cannot see him becomes almost more real than Miss Grenfell herself. You would deny yourself, too, the pleasure of Miss Rose Hill's personification of an immensely popular singer who has the ill-luck to be tone-deaf, of Mr. Max Adrian's versatile and slightly waspish urbanity and of Miss Marjorie Dunkel's unerring parodies of our leading actresses. Not to see Penny Plain would be a mistake, though to see it may entail, for a few, some slight aftermath of disappointment. PETER FLEMING.
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