“WHILE THE SUN SHINES"

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25159, 15 April 1947, Page 5

“WHILE THE SUN SHINES"

THE STAGE

Rattigan Comedy At Theatre Royal

A WELL MATCHED CAST

“While the Suri Shines,” which began a week’s season at the Theatre Royal last evening, is straight comedy throughout. The cast is as well matched a team of seven as could be wished, end the play is well worth seeing before the war-time situations and references have dated. The laughs it causes are real—not the embarrassing sort which do no more than relax an audience’s nerves—and there is something of true comedy effect in its running stream of easy humour. By the third act the stream seemed to have flowed a little too long and evenly, but that may be too individual an impression; it depends on how interesting one finds the situations, flimsy in themselves, but neatly contrived, which add up to something resembling a plot. Mr John Wood has little difficulty in playing the Earl of Harpenden—Ordinary Seaman Harpenden to the Admiralty—in whose flat and round whose marriage most of the action occurs. It was a delight to hear lines so clearly spoken, and a character presented without a trace of clowning. But Miss Gwenda Wilson does not quite get Lady Elizabeth Randall into three dimensions; she is a little too far out of the world of this play; a little too naive (one guesses) for a W.A.A.F. corporal in the set of which Harpenden is an ornament. Roundly and loudly convincing is Mr Peter French, as Lieutenant Mulvaney of the United States Army Air Forces. Perhaps Mr French is American; if not, his impersonation is the more remarkable. At the same time, and not altogether his fault, he and his lines are most monotonously and remorselessly American—the American of the funny pictures and captions of “Esquire.” It is a habit to laugh when the funny American finds himself confronted with a real live Earl; but the edge of Lieutenant Mulvaney’s astonishment might well have dulled a little more, some hours later, when he meets the Duke of Ayr and Stirling (Mr Reginald Newson), hard-up nobleman and company promoter, Harpenden’s father 7 in-law to be.

Similarly. Mr Stephen Staughton’s Free French airman, Lieutenant Colbert, is over-energetically French. Yet this is comedy, after all, and Terence Rattigan’s stock American and Frenchman may be accepted with a good enough grace; at least as good a grace as Shakespeare’s stock Welshman. Mr Newson impresses his Duke upon us as a real personality; his acting is spirited and sound. All the males are, in fact, so good in places, that the stereotyped effect is puzzling; the answer is that this play deals in material of the very best ready-made sort, and has little to do with reality, even the reality of comedy. Harpenden is on leave to be married. Mulvaney, whom he has put up for the night, makes love to Elisabeth, supposing her to be Mabel Crum, the latter having been proposed to him by Harpenden as a suitable young woman with a fondness for Americans. Colbert also pays attentions to Elisabeth, w -i s fl n ®lly persuaded that marriage with Harpenden would be fatal to both. The Duke is in despair. Harpenden proposes to Mabel Crum—Miss Theo Thompson’s appearance and manner are rather loud for such a flourishing young person as Mabe]—but is altruistically refused by her. Elisabeth loves him after all. The play ends in a whirl of frenzied dressing for church, the sentimental, as usual, rescuing the sophisticated in the nick of time.