LONDON STREETS.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 284, 30 November 1928, Page 6

LONDON STREETS.

The street life of London has seldom had a more appreciative visitor than an American artist now making his first tour who recorded his impressions in the "Manchester Guardian." A decidedly queer place, this London. The streets seemed to him to be full of people who were obviously characters, and everything went slowly enough for it to be seen and really looked at. Then the ekies were near at hand, and one just couldn't help seeing them, and night came on so slowly that effects were always changing, and one saw the shop lights .coming out and burning along as it grew darker in the buildings, while the sky overhead was still green and lemon. A curious phenomenon to one used to the sudden change of New York, where the lights all went up and it was another thing at once. Then he was full of wonderment at the life going on in the streets, and puzzled as to why the English should refuse to have outdoor cafes like the French when all the time here were Londoners sitting and standing in their thousands outside theatres, eating and drinking while they watched what was in fact a cabaret entertainment. The long lines of people waiting outside the theatres for tho cheaper seats, whieh cannot be reserved in advance in London, delighted him. In the central theatre district, the West End of London, at a score of theatres and big "movie" houses he found crowds of people waiting cheerfully for hours, many of them sitting on little stools hired from a street vendor, some of them eating sandwiches and candy and fruit, and some even drinking tea from thermos flasks, and once he saw a woman making tea on a little collapsible spirit stove. Hawkers with wheeled trays or pushcarte were selling things, and on the edge of the sidewalks, beside the lines of people, or standing in the gutter, he found odd people singing songs, or reciting Shakespeare, or swallowing swords, or tying themselves in knots, all, so it seemed to him, for his own especial amusement. In short, it was an outdoor cabaret. Some of the street artists who so delighted this wandering New Yorker have been "in the business," as it were for years. Their little act over, they walk the length of the queue, hat in hand. Sometimes they collect only a few pennies, occasionally a piece of silver gleams through the tiny pile of copper. But, the collection over, they waste no time further in that place. Their plan of action is to visit as many queues before eight o'clock, or 8.15, when the gallery and pit doors are opened and the crowds troop in, as they possibly can. After that? The nearest "pub," probably, if one judges them by their red noses, their general seedy appearance. No street performer goes in for elaborate accessories. One man carries around to each queue nothing but a newspaper. But with this he can do magical things. He folds it in many pieces, tears a bit here and a bit there, and flips it out. It is a row of dancing dolls, or a recognisable portrait of the Duchess of York, or the Prince of Wales, or it is a flock of birds in full flight, or an airplane, or a galloping horse. His speciality is speed. His hands work so swiftly that even the nearest spectator cannot tell how many folds or how many tears he makes in his paper Another man will carry a couple of spoons and dance a clog dance while he beats time all over himself, from his head to his legs, with those spoons. Balieff was once so taken with one of these spoon artists' that he engaged the man to appear in one of his Chauve-Souris sketches for a few weeks. Sometimes there is rivalry SomeS o ?* , ,*" 18 "Pinched" somebody's own private pitch, and he is chased off, indignantly, but mostly the rights of each performer are respected and each visits his own particular favourite theatre queue in turn. Londoners would find waiting to get into a theatre a dull business if it were not for their outdoor "cabaret" turns.