THEATRE

Press, Volume LXXXVIII, Issue 26633, 19 January 1952, Page 3

THEATRE

My Life My Stage. By Ernest Stem. Gollancz. 302 pp. Sixty Years of Theatre. By Ernest Short. Eyre and Spottiswoode. 402 pp.

Ernest Stern is one of the most famous stage designers of the last 60 years. In this graceful, chatty book he tells of his lifelong association with great producers and with noble productions—as also with lesser directors and puff-pastry productions. Born a Roumanian he gravitated naturally to Vienna, intending to become an accountant. but became an artist instead and, with a burning interest in the visual aspect of the theatre, turned to stage-designing. After experience in Munich he went to Berlin and beaan a long association with Max Reinhardt, then just starting the long career which was to be studded with monumental productions of many great ’classics (like “Hamlet ’) and many a spectacular eyeful (like “The Miracle”). Theirs was a fruitful, creative partnership which stimulated a new imaginative approach to stagedesign all over the world (even if Ziegfeld is the logical extreme, or Billy Rose and his "Aquacade”). Mr Stern worked with British showmen like Cochran and Oscar Asche, in films with Lubitsch in the silent days of Pola Negri and Emil .Tannings, and then rose to new popular heights with his settings for such operettas as “The White Horse Inn” and “Lilac Time.” A fabulously varied period in European theatre is seen from a special angle, but seen so simply, clearly and modestly that it is genuinely interesting to everyone.

Ernest Short covers roughly the same period, but confines himself to British theatre, to a comprehensive survey of actors from Irving to Olivier; plays from “The Bells” to “The Cocktail Party”; playwrights from Pinero to Fry: and everything else, from Gaiety Girls to Cochran and Coward, from Gilbert and Sullivan to Flanagan and Allen, from Dan Leno to Sid Field. It is encyclopaedic in scope and order, critically shrewd and to the point, and always neatly anecdotal. This must be the best book of its kind in existence, for Mr Short’s knowledge of every aspect of the theatre is colossal.