WOMEN AND THE DRAMA.

Hokitika Guardian, 5 January 1928, Page 2

WOMEN AND THE DRAMA.

11. seems hardly deniable Hint liinlU'l's pertaining to tlio drama are getting into something of a mix-up. Hero, for example. is a terrific row going on at Oxford because tho University Dramatic Society have for the first time included a woman undergraduate in tlio cast of a play, while the leading producers in the theatrical world are busy demolishing an old theory with their new slogan, “The 'Woman’s the Tiling.” And who will deny that women dominate the modern stage—at least to the extent of attracting us thither? Even when they tell us brutally that we are only “lumps of suet,” we smile and smile and feel jolly grateful that they don’t call us lumps of dirt, .which in fact (according to the Eden story) we are ! Presumably the opponents of this Oxford innovation are taking their cue from men like Sir Hall Caine, who has dubbed flic British drama, of to-day as “utterly insincere and impure,” and the determined to preserve the Elizabethan tradition of leaving women to chew their nuts and apples in the balconies and stalls among the suet. But one fears it-is yet another lost cause added to the Oxonian Museum. (Shakespearean drama, w.e arc told by those who play :t, is quite out of favour, and as if to clinch the argument the Censor of Plays in Lithuania has just forbidden the performance of any of Shakespeare’s plays.—The “Glasgow Herald.” POLITTCTAXS. Tt is a curious sidelight on contemporary psychology that no phrase has survived from the war period which corresponds in its censure of soldiers "it'h the übiquitous sneer of “damned politicians.” The reason must certainly not he looked for in any superfluity of vulgar respect for the professional soldier. The lack of a conventional term of contumely for the professional soldier may, perhaps, he due to an instinctive desire to keep the right- side of men who may in certain eventualities hold one’s life in their hands. The old lady who bowed in church whenever the devil was mentioned—because, she explained, “one never knows what may hapnen, and politeness costs nothing”—has her counterpart in the multitude who- rejected the soldiers claim to infallibility in the war but choose nowadays to echo his complaints of the “damned politicians.” The popular contempt in which politicians (and lawyers, who so often make the best politicians) are supposed to lie,, held iu this country—it is, of course, much more apparent than real—may, on the other hand, he explained by the fact that most men are jealous of those who surpass them in their own province. Every voter is, to some extent, a politician: every man who can argue is a lawyer in embryo. We cannot forgive our superiors, though we may permit success in other spheres.— “Scrutator” in the “Empire Beviow.”