"A Night Out."
Everybody except myself seems to recall the fact that the late farce of
this name, adapted from _L'Hôtel du Libre Echange_, ran for five hundred
nights before it expired. Some restorative music has now been applied to it
and the corpse has revived. Indeed there are the usual signs of another
long run. The trouble is that nearly all the cast at the Winter Garden
Theatre seem to think that, if the play is to run, they must run too. They
don't keep still for a moment, because they dare not. Even Mr. LESLIE
HENSON, whose fun would be more effective if he didn't try so hard, feels
that he must be at top pressure all the while with his face and his body
and his words. Yet he could well afford to keep some of his strength in
reserve, for he is a born humourist (in what one might perhaps call the
Golliwog vein). But, whether it is that he underrates his own powers or
that he can't contain himself, he keeps nothing in reserve; and the others,
less gifted, follow his lead. They persist in "pressing," as if they had no
confidence in their audience or their various authors or even themselves.
One is, of course, used to this with singers in musical comedy, who make a
point of turning the lyrics assigned to them into unintelligible patter.
Perhaps in the present case we lost little by that, though there was one
song (of which I actually heard the words) that seemed to me to contain the
elements of a sound and consoling philosophy. It ran something like this:--
For you won't be here and I won't be here
When a hundred years are gone,
But somebody else will be well in the cart*
And the world will still go on.
* Or, alternatively, soup.
Mr. LESLIE HENSON, as I have hinted, allowed himself--and us--no rest. His
energy was devastating; he gave the audience so much for their money that
in the retrospect I feel ashamed of not having paid for my seat. One's
taste for him may need acquiring; but, once acquired, there is clearly no
getting away from it. Perhaps his most irresistible moment was when he laid
out six policemen and then meekly surrendered to a female constable who led
him off by the ear.
Mr. FRED LESLIE (a name to conjure with!) was almost fiercely emphatic in
the part of _Paillard_, and I preferred the relatively quiet methods of Mr.
AUSTIN MELFORD, who did without italics. Mr. RALPH ROBERTS was droll as a
waiter; and it may have been my fault that I found Mr. DAVY BURNABY rather
unfunny in the part of _Matthieu_.
Of the ladies, two could sing and two, or even three, could act (Miss LILY
ST. JOHN could do both); nearly all had good looks and a few of them were
pleasantly acrobatic.
The scene of the Hotel Pimlico, with an alleged private sitting-room on one
side, an alleged bedroom on the other, and a hall and staircase in the
middle, was extraordinarily unconvincing. The partition walls came to an
end at quite a long distance from the front; and, with the general company
spreading themselves at large over the whole width of the foreground, it
was very difficult to entertain any illusion of that privacy which is of
the essence of the _cabinet particulier_. I say nothing of the bedroom,
whose tenancy was frankly promiscuous.
The fun, of course, is old-fashioned; if one may say it of a French farce,
it is Victorian. Apart from a few topical allusions worked in rather
perfunctorily there is scarcely anything said or done that might not have
been said or done in the 'eighties. But for a certain type of Englishman
there is a perennial attraction in feeling that at any moment the
proprieties may be outraged. That they never actually are outraged does not
seem very greatly to affect his pleasure. He can always console himself
with easy conjecture of the wickedness of the original. So there will never
be wanting a public for these _Noctes Parisianæ_.
Let us hope that somehow it all helps to keep the sacred flame of the
Entente burning. _Vive MILLERAND!_