"CINDERELLA."
[Illustration: A HORSE-SENSE OF HUMOUR.
_Pipchin_. . . . . . . . . . . Mr. STANLEY LUPINO.
_Baroness Beauxchamps_ . . . . Mr. WILL EVANS.
]
It is a very delicate task that the annual pantomime imposes upon Mr.
ARTHUR COLLINS. He has to "surpass himself," but he must not do it
once for all or he would rob the critics of their most cherished
phrase. He reminds me of the constructors of our Atlantic
"greyhounds," each longer by a yard or two than the last, each swifter
by a fraction of a knot, each with a few more tons displacement,
all pronounced to be the final word in scientific invention, yet all
reserving something for the next time.
Certainly the present year marks an advance in one respect at
least--that the grotesque and the beautiful are kept reasonably apart;
the lovely colour-scheme, for instance, of the garden in Fairyland is
undisturbed by any element of buffoonery. There was a revival too of
topical allusiveness after the reticence proper to war-time; and the
GEDDES family must be justifiably flattered by their admission to a
choric refrain.
The humour, of which Mr. STANLEY LUPINO bore the brunt, was here and
there a little thin, and it is time that somebody let the Management
of Drury Lane into the open secret that the pun, as an instrument of
mirth, has long been a portion of the dreadful past. Mr. WILL EVANS,
as the _Baroness Beauxchamps_, seldom let himself go, being no doubt
held in restraint by a consciousness of his resemblance to Miss ELLEN
TERRY. Not enough chance was given to Miss LILY LONG (the _Elder
Sister_), who has a very nice sense of fun. As for Mr. CLAFF, who
played the operatic _Baron_, his most humorous moment was when he
meant to be most serious. This was in a song in praise of _Prince
Charming_, "featuring" H.R.H. in a portrait curiously unlike the
original.
The two most effective incidents were borrowed from the Circus and the
Halls. Mr. DU CALION, who had no other very obvious claims to play the
part of a humorous courtier, did his famous ladder-feat--a perfectly
gratuitous performance, for, though he was supposed to be rescuing
_Cinderella_ through a top-storey window, she had the good sense to
descend by the staircase, having ignored, as is the way of Love, the
locked door that made this impossible.
The other imported business was the work of a black horse, who
preserved an expression of extreme gravity and detached boredom
during the play of human wit around his person, dissimulating his own
superior gifts of humour until called upon to illustrate them with
some excellent circus-tricks.
On the sentimental side, Miss MARIE BLANCHE, obedient to the
inexorable tradition that a young hero of pantomime must be a woman,
played _Prince Charming_ with the right manners that makyth man; and
as _Cinderella_ Miss FLORENCE SMITHSON once more breathed that air of
innocence which still remains unstaled by years of steady addiction
to the heroine habit. Her vocal intrusions, always well received, were
not always well timed; certainly it was an error of judgment to insert
a solo at the cross-roads after she had told us that she hadn't a
moment to spare if she was to get home from the ball before the rest
of the family. But here again it was a matter of obedience to some
unwritten and inscrutable law of pantomime which it is not for us, the
profane, to question.
And in this spirit I tender a grateful acknowledgment not only of
the good things that my intelligence could appreciate in this lavish
entertainment, but also of the other things that I can never hope to
understand.