"JOURNEY'S END."

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 19819, 6 January 1930, Page 5

"JOURNEY'S END."

MR R. C. SHERRIFF ENTERTAINED.

MRS SNOWDEN'S IMPRESSIONS.

(FROM OUB OWX COEREBPOKDBKT.)

LONDON, November 26.

The members of the O.P. Club held a dinner at Hotel Cecil on Sunday night to congratulate Mr R. C Sherriflf and the members of the company on the universal and international success of the play, "Journey's End." The play is now being performed in London and the provinces, in New York, Chicago, Melbourne, Paris, Stockholm, Islo, Athens, Prague, Helsingforß, Amsterdam, in forty-eight theatres in different parts of Germany, and by touring companies in Canada, Central Europe, the West Indies, India, and the Far East. Mr and Mrs Philip Snowden and Mr and Mrs J. R. Clynes were among those present. Mrs Snowden, proposing the toast of the author, «-aid that when she saw the play she felt more interested and enthralled than she had ever felt in her life before or ever hoped to again. It was "the glory of the Temple" that she felt as she listened. Mr Sherriff had given them a great play, with a great message and a profound hope. "If ever there is another war," continued Mrs Snowden, "the greater part of the responsibility will be placed upon women. They must not be side-tracked by the shallow declaration that the British soldier can do anything anywhere and never feel it. We must spend all our energies in preventing our young men from suffering in the future as many millions of them have suffered in the past." Saying that she looked forward with eargerness to Mr Sherriff's next play, Mrs Snowden said: "I should like him to do for another war what he has done for the war we know. He had taught what moral and spiritual degradation can come from international warfare. I should like him to be the great revealer of the horrors of that industrial warfare which obliges millions of men, even in this time of peace, to tramp our streets in search of work." Mr Sherriff said that in writing "Journey's End" simply to gratifv himself it was easv for him to tell the truth as he saw it with his own eves. He believed he had done it There was the greatest variety of criticisms, of which he gave amusing examples, but one he resented was Wat which held he belittled the BritTsh officer. Some critics, he thought, saw only the whiskv bottle in his play There was not a soldier in it who had drunk so much that he was not equal to anv emer<rencv that might happen. Why'should people become angry because he made war break men s nerves ?