"YOUNG WOODLEY."

Press, Volume LXV, Issue 19671, 15 July 1929, Page 7

"YOUNG WOODLEY."

In "Young Woodley," the author, John Van Druten, exploits that youthful fever which is contemptuously and very foolishly dismissed by sensible people as "calf-love." This play, to be produced by a new English company at the Theatre Royal on Friday next, and for five nights only, deals with the love of a boy of eighteen for a woman several years older than himself —the wife of his housemaster. It is an interesting study of the attitude of young lads to the god who drove Cleopatr* to the kiss of the asp and 6ent Borneo and Juliet to the same tomb. One lad sees love as a series of discreditable and furtive episodes with servant girls; one does not believe there ie really any such thing as romantic love—the third, Young Woodley, is a poet, and sees love as a poet would. The story serves to introduce some clever and interesting new actors to theatregoers. Of these, perhaps, Mr Lewis Shaw, as Woodley, is the most interesting. He is, for so youthful an actor, very full of the sense of a most difficult part, in which he has to express the awkwardness of diffident youth brought face to face with life. He is able to present the psvchology of a schoolboy in a phase which, though unfamiliar to their parents, is perfectly true and entirely usual —the awakening interest and puzzle of sex. Miss Natalie Moya. too, makes a very charming and gentle instructress in love to the young hero. She shows a capacity for restrained emotion, which is not at all common, and her part of the last scene in which the youm? wife tries to undo any spiritual damage she feels she mav have done is a reallv' morin? piece of acting. Mr Frank Rovde. as the sarcastic housemaster, who is detested bv the bovs, and who at heart detests them, is the tycical nedagogue. Mr Trevor as a chubby-faced and ink-stained small boy, and Mr George Preston, Michael Macowan, and Edward AshTey, as prefects, ail show talent in youthful parts. The box plans open on Wednesday at The Bristol.