MADAME TUSSAUD'S

Evening Star, Issue 19762, 12 January 1928, Page 10

MADAME TUSSAUD'S

ASiB TEST OF FASH

TUN NEW EXHIBITION

Yv'lien Madame Tussaud’s was burned down it meant something more than 1 the end of a building. Something broke that can never be put together again—not if all the king's horses and all the king’s men try (writes a correspondent of the London ‘Sunday Observer’). One had, perhaps, for the first time, an inkling that those flames closed, as tho school books say, an epoch, when it was announced a day or two ago that Mr li. G. Wells is to figure at the new exhibition which opens early next year. It is not so much that Mr Wells is an iconoclast; not so much that he will brood on his pedestal (if pedestal be provided) with an air of scientific detachment, as one planning an outline of wax. After all, he will bo accompanied by Sir Oliver Lodge, and even in tho old exhibition Bernard Shaw stood gossiping all day with Dickens and an airman called Louis Paulhajm, who flew to Manchester in 1910. No—it is not iconoclasm, not science, but a topicality, a certain up-to-dateness, that characterises the future Madame Tussaud. Once she looked back. lovingly towards tho guillotine and the treasured coffee cup, sainted by the lips of the first Napoleon; now she looks forward to one knows not what new religions, what monlike gods. There has passed for ever from tho earth a famous frowsy smell. There was a dinginess that is no more. In a talk I had with, the general manager of the new company, that was one ol the things on which he insisted. One has known certain intolerant adolescents who have visited the old exhibition and come away declaring that they had smelt the nineteenth century and found it stale. Certainly there was something about the cdor of the old place which was glorious, triumphantly out of date. But now there is to be an exhibition arranged scientifically, with fresh air, fresh paint, and Mr Wells.

Tho exhibition, in the manager’s words, is to be ‘‘produced”—produced in the fullest, most modern sense of that popular word. There are to be lighting schemes, tableaux a la Gordon Craig, and dresses according to the best history books; newness in everything. The manager even doubted whether the famous Sleeping Beauty (whose breast, you will remember, heaved) and the Cobbett who from time to time would turn bis head impolitely and stare, will appear again. “Wo have to keep abreast with the times; we have to surprise the public,” he said. The Babes in the Wood are only getting in by the skin of their teeth. It is held that modern children will probably be more pleased by an elaborate jungle with wild animals that is being prepared. The new Chamber of Horrors is to lose its honest drabness and the scholarliness of its exhibits in glass cases. It is to bo made thoroughly Grand Guignol. George Augustas Sala’s catalogue is to be no more. A catalogue will be written wittily by a bright young man. There will bo new faces, and, in a double sense, new figures. There is Mr Winston Churchill, for instance, who, in the old days, was of fashionable form and svelte; but now, alas! not only has he to be sent for a new suit of clothes, but he has to he bom again cast in a larger mould. Sir James Barrie is coming with Sir Hall Caine, Thomas Hardy, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Dempsey is coming with a few famous airmen, Sir Gerald du Maurier with Mussolini; and as they come in the front door, certain ponderous Victorians will doubtless walk out at the back.

When one inquires alter the new arrivals in the Chamber of Horrors, the answer is doubtful. It seems that the standard of murders has gone up—■ De Quincey’s principles of artistic murder have prevailed. As any casual visitor to the old chamber must have noticed, it did not take much in the way of a murder to permit election there. Take the case of Herbert John Bennett, who appeared large as life. In the words of the catalogue, he “ murdered bis wifn on Yarmouth Beach in Sentera-

her, 1900, by strangling her with a brotlace.” "The catalogue ends the story with the laconic, if ungrammatical sentence, “ Hanged.” Now it is tdear to any connoisseur that there is not much here to merit any special distinction—a certain ingenuity in the choice of tools, that is all. „ “ We are short ol good new mun.cr, the manager said. One can only conclude that while the standards cl criticism have gone up the standard of performance lags behind.