REVIVALS

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 637, 13 April 1929, Page 24

REVIVALS

London Stage Showing Old Favourites I PHYLLIS DARE IN STRAIGHT PLAY j Revivals are the thing at the moj ment in the London theatre. Fred Terry is to show the West End his Mary Queen of Scots play, “The Borderer,” which is pretty well known in the provinces, and so add to a list which already contains “The Rumour,” “The Chinese Bungalow,” “Quality Street,” “Fashion,” and “A Hundred Years Old,” writes William Pollock in “The Daily Mail.” “The Borderer,” in which Phyllis Neilson-Terry is to play for her mother. Julia Neilson-Terry, who is left with a slightly weak heart following influenza, is one of a dozen or so imminent fresh London productions, a number of which are not actually new. Among them are the following: “The Confederacy” (a 200-years-old play by Vanbrugh), at the Lyric, Hammersmith. “Berkeley Square.” “Major Barbara” (with Sybil Thorndike, at Wyndham’s). “Mr. What's His Name?” (to follow the pantomime at the Lyceum). “Aren’t We All?” In his “Mr. What’s His Name?” revival Seymour Hicks will have with him Margaret Yarde, Edmund Gwenn,

and Isobel Elsom. Miss Elsom has done a great deal of acting with Mr. Hicks since, early in her stage career, she toured with him in “Broadway Jones,” and other plays. She started, as did so many subsequently leading

actresses, in musical comedy chorus. Eighteeen years ago she was singing and dancing for £3 a week in “The Quaker Girl” at the Adelphi.

Tom Walls has often said that he wanted to revive Frederick Lonsdale’s “Aren’t We All?”—“it’s as smooth as old brandy,” he once said to me—and now he is going to do so at the Fortune. A feature of this revival will be that Phyllis Dare will make her first appearance in a straight part. Miss

Dare is another protegee of Mr. Hicks; she was with him in her earliest musical comedy days. For years she has been the best acress—not the best allround artist; Evelyn Laye is probably that —on the musical play stage in London.