STAGE FAVOURITE

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLV, Issue 21088, 14 July 1938, Page 10

STAGE FAVOURITE

IRENE VANBRUGH’S JUBILEE LONDON, June 21. When, on the stage of His Majesty’s Theatre, London. Irene Vanbrugh graciously thanked everyone for her great jubilee matinee, her mind must have gone back. Fifty years before, when her father. Prebendary Barnes, consulted him about his two daughters, Irene and Violet, W. T. Stead warned him that the stage was an evil place! Yet both were acting in the matinee, both stars for many years, while Kenneth Barnes, the Prebendary’s son, was present, head now of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Prudence, Violet’s daughter, “walked on.”

All the stars now in London took part, and, more than that, the Queen sat in a box with the Duchess of Kent. So the stage does not seem to have done the Prebendary’s daughters much harm . . . We saw how the theatre had moved when Irene re-enacted her famous part of Sophie Fullgarney in “The Gay Lord Quex” —the bedroom scene which, in 1899, so shocked all the bishops that they wrote in. Now it seemed quite respectable. Indeed, a real monk, In a black robe, applauded it! Irene, too, again acted her old parts in A. A. Milne's "Belinda” and Barrie's “Rosalind,” while her sister Violet appeared as Katherine in b. bit of "Henry VIII.” “It’s nearly time for my jubilee . . . When is yours, dear?” That is the sort of joke that went round among the older players. Irene Vanbrugh’s three reminders of her maturity were revelations of a skill and a poise seldom equalled by the actresses of our time. Then, right at the end, when, sur-

rounded In a stage door 'scene by a hundred of her “comrades,” as she called them, she thanked them all for a casket they had given her, she spoke with a natural graciousness that displayed her great sincerity of character. “We hear of people being given the freedom of a city,” she said. “I feel that, to-day, you have given me the freedom of my heart.” So they had!