Pamela’s Budget From London

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 318, 31 March 1928, Page 24

Pamela’s Budget From London

Two Impressive Ceremonies Macbeth in Khaki... Anthony Asquith’s Film... A Fashion Note ...

(Written by PAMELA TRAVERS, THE SUN’S London correspondent.) BHIS week I have been to two processions—a sad and a merry one. The first was the funeral of Earl Haig, when flags flew at half-mast and people stood very quietly to attention as the old soldier moved among them for the last time. The drums rolled gently, almost tenderly, as the gun-carriage passed the Cenotaph and the wind blew the white feathers in the field-marshal’s hat into momentary wildness. ... A few days ago I saw the king driving down the Mall to open Parliament. The Beefeaters skirled their red skirts jauntily as they walked at the head of the procession and swung their lanterns with rhythmic precision. Like all Beefeaters they were terribly pleased with themselves —full of their own immaculate importance. Were they not going to search the vaults before the King entered the great House at Westminster as their fathers and grandfathers had done ever since bungling Guy Fawkes failed to carry out his scheme? The search is, of course, entirely formal, a mere point of etiquette. What the Beefeaters would do if they discovered a second’ Guy in the vaults X dare not think. They would be too surprised to do more than blink and Guy would have fired the fuse and been out through a secret door and into a Thames smack before they had blinked again. I have been to see Macbeth in modern dress. I must confess that I went with much trepidation for the thought of Lady Macbeth saying “Give me the daggers,” while she kicked the train of a pink satin teagown out of the way was not very uplifting. From the beginning to the end the whole production was macabre in the extreme. Its terrors and its gloom, its thunder and its inevitableness, became fantastic and shallow as a silly nightmare. Lady Macbeth was quite incredible until, changing her short skirts for a nightgown, she came walking weirdly through the shadows with her candle, and Macbeth himself—well!—played by Eric Maturin in a thin, gabbling Oxford draw-ing-room voice one wanted to call him Mr. Macbeth and the evening a night. In a khaki uniform under an ermine cloak he looked as though he had dressed up for some amateur theatricals. He was just testily annoyed when the terrific news came that Birnau was on its way to Dunsinane and the sword play at the end when the banners hung out on the outward walls was like some mad dream about a fencing school. It was a relief to turn from Shakespeare to the modernest of films— Anthony Asquith's “Shooting Stars.” This is a film which, when it eventually arrives in New Zealand, nobody must miss. It is by far the best thing that, has vet occurred in the British film world. The story, acting and production rank it with the best productions of the Continent. These quiet English actors and actresses moved across the sheet with complete HHH reality, behaving as though they had BBM ""° e intimate relationship with life,

thinking thoughts that are possible and common to the human mind. Really, it is difficult to give this film too much praise. I could write columns on its perfection. Women are being worn thinner than ever in London, and consequently the ordinary restaurants are having a great slump. What fun is there in catering for a race of people which lives on rusks and drops of orange juice? The extraordinary restaurants make up for the decrease in the demand for “beef and two veg.” by charging exorbitant prices for rusks and calling them Biscuits des Anges, while oranges are metamorphosed into pommes des etoiles and are correspondingly expensive. Indeed, we are nearly wraiths of ourselves —so much so that the story is told of a small boy rushing to his father in terror, screaming: “Daddy, I’ve just seen a ghost who looks like mummy.” New Zealand is, I hear, to have a host of new immigrants—watery creatures, who are not registered under the ordinary immigration Acts. Black bass, halibut and herring are leaving English waters for sunnier climes but since the creatures had not shown enough energy or initiative to make the move for themselves they are being conveyed to your seas and harbours in ships. This is, I think, the last indignity—a fish to travel in a ship, a frail, ignorant thing of wood and iron. But halibut and herring are notoriously lacking in pride, and anyone may insult them with impunity. Marie Tempest has a new play—and a new part full of laughing possibilities. 1 saw the first performance of “The Masque of Venice.” It was delicate and gay, a charming nothingness, a pleasant absurd dramatic emptiness. It had al! the qualities of a decoration, a frieze of fantastic.

hardly human figures. But, alas, there was nothing to decorate, no wall to paint the frieze upon. George Tully as a sort of re-hash of Byron was child-like and deliciously inconsequent, and Marie Tempest herself as a "literary celebrity” all agog for passionate biography and throbbing fiction—a gorgeous and familiar mixture of commercialism, hypocrisy and “soul” who imagines herself a literary descendant of Madame de Stael—was a delight. She was particularly delicious when, full of uplift and with a spiritual pen noting down the good phrases for her own future use, she listened to a direct descendant of Casanova and a Puritan maid reading a series of modern love letters. Behind these fantastic, one-dimen-sional figures flowed an unreal fantastic Venice, a Venice that had been cut out with embroidery scissors, I think, from an absurd story book. Not a good play, but a play that has sudden brilliant moments like the flashes of gold in a lump of quartz.

And for these flashes one must be thankful, since, theatrically, we are living in an arid waste of crime dramas and conventional plays about dukes and actresses that are as inspiring as a plate of porridge. If you are the kind of person who wears buttonholes, then you must change the kind of person you are. For these are terribly viex jeu nowadays. The only wear—beyond observing the decencies of ordinary dress —is the epaulette, of which there must be only one. This is a bejewelled thing that resembles a Masonic emblem rather than anything else, or it is like a miniature sporran worn in the wrong place! Still, it is the fashion, and what woman worthy of the name would not became a crusader in such a cause?