IN THE THEATRE

Southland Times, Issue 25312, 15 June 1935, Page 13

IN THE THEATRE

A. J. Cronin, author of the novels “Hatter’s Castle” and “The Stars Look Down,” is at the moment trying his hand on a play. After Dickens’ adaptations for the stage, Dickens on the films—Dickens himself has been put on the stage. A play called “The King of Rome”— dealing with the Due de Reichstadt, Napoleon’s child known in Rostand’s play as “L’Aiglon”—was recently produced by John Wyse for special matinees at the Royalty Theatre, Lonvdon. “Espoir,” the latest Henri Bernstein study of upper-middle-class manners, is one of the successes of the 1934-5 season in Paris, and so is “Prosper,” which gave Gaston Baty an opportunity of presenting a number of vivid stage pictures of low life in the seaport of Algiers. At the Ambassadeurs, Clariend, represents the disillusion of a financier who returns to his family after ten years’ penal servitude, in a play, the work of a very young author, Jean Anouilh that showed a remarkable quality of dramatic imagination. “Tessa,” Jean Giraudoux’s version of "The Constant Nymph,” and the French translations of two Noel Coward com-

edies, “Private Lives,” and “Design for Living”; were' successes. There were a number of profitable revivals, including Bourdet’s “La Prissoniere” and Pagnol's “Topaze,” to mention fairly recent successes, and “Henri 111. et sa cour,” to go back to the earliest play of the elder Dumas, long before he became a novelist, the play which started the romantic movement in tile theatre more than a hundred years ago.