BUXTON DRAMA FESTIVAL

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 71, 21 September 1939, Page 18

BUXTON DRAMA FESTIVAL

The third Buxton Drama Festival opened with "Romeo and Juliet," with an interesting cast, wrote "The Post's" London correspondent on August 29. The appearance of Mr. Robert Donat and ,Miss Constance Cummings (Mrs. Benn- Levy) drew a full house. Mr. Ivor Brown ("Manchester Guardian") says: "Mr. Donat's Romeo was of the modern school, an eminently agreeable young man who passes from the undergraduate's love of clever ta,lk to the full status of a tragic hero involved in - a terrible doom. He very well showed us the transition from boy to man. Although in stance and movement rather awkward. Mr. Donat yet gave the part immense decorative value, quiet sincerity, and a simple likeability. But he lacked something of the divine fire and a vocal richness of a tragedy which is a superb lyric as well as.a play with a plot. The same was true of Miss Cummings. whose Juliet' also grew from girl to woman most persuasively. She was immensely decorative and palpably eager to give us a sense of authentic passion and poignant suffering, and not a series of histrionic exercises. So far nothing could have been better. But the ability to preserve the poetry amid the realism was not there. Miss Marie Ney, as the Nurse, seemed to have come to Italy out of Warwickshire by way of a Dutch canvas and was a very' racy piece of character performance." "The Times" comment was:. "For any approach to genuine distinction we must look to Miss Marie Ney's Nurse, a consistently amusing performance, though even that is surely a triumph of accomplishment over temnersmpnt."