LONDON PLAYS

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20058, 3 October 1939, Page 8

LONDON PLAYS

TRANSFER TO COUNTRY RESULT OF EVACUATION LONDON, Sept. 12. West End theatrical companies, after having been idle for more than a week, are planning tours of provincial towns where the audiences are likely to be greater than usual because they are crowded with people evacuated from London.

Such places as Blackpool, Brighton, Cardiff, and Leicester will have the rare experience during the next few weeks of seeing John Gielgud, Edith Evans, Marie Tempest, and Diana Wynyard. Already theatres have been reopened with London companies at Brighton and Blackpool. Golders Green, the Hippodrome, and the Kingston Empire, are the nearest theatres to London so far permitted to open.

The dramatic critic of the Daily Telegraph, Mr. W. A. Darlington, writes a notice of the kind of entertainment which many may experience in the near future. During an air raid warning, he took refuge in a shelter which was formerly a dance hall, and contains scats for 400, a piano, and a microphone on the platform. For two hours would-be crooners, tap-dancers, singers, and reciters from among the people sheltered there, and entertained their fellows. A prominent editor, wearing trousers and a pyjama jacket, recited a humorous poem which he scribbled on a cardboard gas-mask box.

Bailie Hardie, presiding at an Edinburgh Court, said that magistrates were dealing with more than four times the usual number of cases of drunkenness.

“It is high time that some entertainment was provided for the people,” he declared. “We should not leave this function entirely to the public houses.”