TAKING IT SERIOUSLY.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 4, Issue 122, 17 December 1915, Page 3 (Supplement)

TAKING IT SERIOUSLY.

A famous actor was playing a part where he finished up by sitting on the Embankment, ragged, cold, hungry. It made a fine curtain.

He received the following letter one morning

"Dear Pal,—l been there mysel so you ave my simpafy. I've struck a bit of luck latly so enclo6 a p.o. for a bob which I ope will do yer a bit of good." He keeps that letter as a souvenir. Miss Terriss was playing Cinderella. Sho received from a little girl a nice letter, a halfpenny, and a bag of acid tablets. She ate the tablets and keeps the letter and coin. A Dreadnought was in harbour, *' somewhere in Scotland," and the men went and filled the gallery of the local gaff. There was a scene in which the popular "Captain" has a 6crap with smugglers. When the attacked the Cap. tain, ten to one, the house was instantly in an uproar. The galleryites actually slid down the pillars to the " lower deck" to help their hero and restore the balance in his favour.

When they had scrambled over the footlights they went in iwith their fists and defeated the smugglers " with great slaughter." It does not do to take very exciting plays to the Far West. They know too much. A play went there called "The Hound Up." Now. you couldn't teach these cowboys anything new about that. By no means. The culmination was reached in a free-fight between desperades and cowboys led by a sheriff —the sort of thing the picture shows have made us familiar with.

Of course, the " guns" on the stago were spoof, but when the real cow bovs of the audience began blazing away the play became much too serious, and although the curtain was quickly run down the local hospital had several cases on its hands. There was an exciting scene at the Sydney Theatre Royal when "An Englishman s Home" was produced. An enthusiastic patriot, seeing Brown, the hero, about to be shot by the invadmg German*, for defending his own home, although he was a civilian, rushed on to the stage shouting that he was an exGuardsman and could not sit still and see an Englishman shot by a sausageeating German. He was hauled out. but vowed he'd go to England, seen, out the author, Major du Maurier, and "punch his head!"