Page 15 Advertisements Column 1

New Zealand Times, Volume XXVIII, Issue 5832, 24 February 1906, Page 15

London's dramatic habits come under [ severe censure in the New York "Dramatic -uirror," where Miss Kate llastorton complains bitterly that imagination is not featured in the English life, and an American misses at the theatre that delicious rustle, the mental whoop-la, the perfumed thrill that is part of the fashionable audience in Now York. London, she says, despite the delightful plays it continues to send to America, has nothing to compare with the actual theatre in the States, and its importance as a phase of American social life. The reason tor this, according to Miss Mastcrton is the late and groat English dinner. Long ago. she says, managers gave up the idea of getting the London public to forsake their dinners until long after eight, and so the curtain-raisers drone along dully to empty seats, interrupted constantly oy arriving parties. By this time the true Britisher, man and woman, has accomplished four meals, and is looking forward to the fifth—not greedily nor anxiously, but surely, seriously,-placidly, with a serenity bred of many sturdy generations of fivc-rnoal ancestors. Another subject for this fair American critic's condemnation is the absence of the discipline and clcan-cut stage management of the American theatre. The English actor-man-ager. she points out, himself with his wife, his own, and hifl wife's relatives, and there is a sort of familiar tea-and-mnffin esprit between the people on the stage that robs the occasion of its glamour. '