PLAYING TO ROYALTY

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 198, 19 May 1936, Page 13

PLAYING TO ROYALTY

‘“Storm in a Teacup” (By 11. P.) Ou Friday evening last, in London, Lady Cunard was privileged to have his Majesty the King as one of her guests at a dinner party in the West End. A unique feature of the evening succeeding the dinner was the performof the last act of James Bridie’s adapted comedy, "Storm in a Teacup,” actors, stage bands, scenery and effects being transferred from the. Haymarket Theatre to Lady Cunard’s drawingroom in taxi-cabs and private cars. The names of two people known in New Zealand were mentioned as being among the players. These were Sara Allgood, who was the original Peg in ‘‘Peg o’ My Heart” in New Zealand and Australia, and Mr. C. M. Hallard, who was here with Mr. Dion Boucicault and Miss Irene Vanbrugh. King Edward is said to have congratulated all in the cast. Apart from those mentioned these were Ivy Des Voeux, Anne Wilson, Roger Livesay, Ethel Glendinning, lan McLean, Edgar K. Bruce, Norman MacOwan, Craighall Sherry, Robert Drysdale, Walter Roy and Rupert Siddons.

The comedy is an adaptation from Bruno Frank’s "Sturm In Wasserglass.” One London critic, who describes the fantastic comedy as one of enormous zest, states that the structure of the plot resembled a pyramid turned upside down. A Scottish street hawker cannot renew her dog’s license; the offer of the money by a humane reporter is resented as an impertinence by the pompous Provost of Baikie, who stiffly rules that, the time of grace having expired, the mongrel has passed beyond human aid. From this inverted apex consequences broaden upward until a grotesque mass darkens the town, thwarting the provost’s hopes of election to Parliament, depriving him of his wife and the local newspaper proprietor of his, bringing about a couple of marriages and setting in motion legal proceedings which clearly do uot end with the play. Miss Allgood played the street hawker, whose dog was the transversed point of the pyramid.