GOOD THEATRE MANNERS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 79, Issue 197, 23 August 1935, Page 10

GOOD THEATRE MANNERS

PRAISE FOR NEW YORK BY DAME SYBIL THORNDIKE “Oh, the beautiful manners of New York audiences!” Dame Sybil Thorndike (who was in New Zealand a lew years ago; home m Landon after a 7 months’ run in New York, and surrounded by half-unpack-ed trunks, turned up her eyes and sighed for the theatres where the gallery never jeers and Idle stalls neitirer cough nor sneeze. “It’s extraordinary,” she saql.“How do they do it J Playing in London, one has to dodge coughs ail the time. In New York, if people cough or sneeze or blow th-eir nose loudly, they are quickly suppressed by the other people in the audience.

“They sit quietly and pay the most beautiful attention from the time the curtain goes up to the time it govs down.”

She sipped her glass of hot milk, warming her hands on it. (“I’m a bit worn out,” she explained, “getting up before dawn in the boat yesterday to see the coast of Ireland. .

“Of course,” she went on, “I love playing in London better than anywhere in the world —one’s own peopic you know, it means something—-out our audiences have got a good deal to learn in the way of manners from American ones.

“If they don’t like a play over there, they begin io steal out unobtrusively towards the end. They don’t upset the actor’s first-night nerves by doing any of the fidgety things our audiences are so fond of.” Dame Hybil has, all the time she has been in the United States (which she had not visited for 24 years), been playing in her London success “The Distaff Side.”

“I don’t quite know why it was such a success,” she said, “because the play is just . . .marriage, you know; and that’s not quite such a serious matter over there as here. Bl ill, they loved it.

“What kind of plays do they want? Well. 1 really believe any good play, so long as it is sincere, and not too intense. Too much intensity was what accounted for Noel Coward’s new play •Point Verlaine' not being the financial success everyone expected. “Mind you, on the whole I think Americans are far more open-minded and bouest in their attitude to the theatre than we are. 'The theatre is their immedfeate national expression, and changes in national life are reflected almost at once in it—here it takes about ten years.”

Thin, vital, brittle-looking as ever Dame Sybil has only a fortnight’s rest in front of her before she begins rehearsing her new play “Grief Goes Over.” by Meyton Hodge, the New Zealander, author of “The Wind and the Rain.”

Philip Reid comes to Paramount to portray the juvenile lead in that company’s “Accent on Youth,” with Sylvia Sidney in the leading feminine role. Others prominently cast include Herbert Marshall, Holmes Herbert and Astrid Allwyn.

Sir Guy Standing owned the very first Model S Ford introduced in Washington, U.S.A., in 1908. Sir Guy, who appeared in Paramount’s “Lives <of a Bengal Lancer,” states that he and his car were a positive sensation in those good old days.