Irene Vanbrugh Returns to Stage

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 857, 28 December 1929, Page 22

Irene Vanbrugh Returns to Stage

TUMULTUOUS WELCOME

NEW BEN LEVY PLAY Bonn Levy Is certainly a versatile playwright; his last play was a Barrieesque study, and now his "Art and Mrs. Bottle” at the Criterion is a comedy something after the manner of Frederick Lonsdale, writes Alan Parsons In the “Dally Mail,” London. Mrs. Bottle is the wife of a sanitary engineer, whom she left when her children were infants to run away with an artist who deserts her equally soon. She returns to Mr. Bottle in the fullness of time to find her grown-

up daughter Judy (Betty Stockfield) in love with the now middle-aged artist with whom she once eloped. On the face of it, it is not a very pretty situation, and it needs all the clever dialogue of Mr. Levy and all the charm of Irene Vanbrugh (welcomed home tumultuously after her long absence) to make it palatable, the more so as Judy appears not only to accept but to welcome the state of affairs.

Miss Vanbrugh has a big chance at the end of the second act, where Max, the artist (Robert Loraine), appears: she fairly lets herself go on the subjects of Art and Love and their general inferiority to Sanitary Engineering (she puts it much more directly than that), and brings down the curtain by a Venetian-bowl smashing act in the most approved Jane Cowl manner. The last act was bound to be a bit of an anti-climax. Judy goes sadly back to her painting; Max goes bis ways; while Mr. and Mrs. Bottle resolve to settled down again together in domestic bliss.

Miss Vanbrugh plays with a vitality and an exuberance which took me hack to old days of “The Thief.”

The most difficult task falls to Miss Stockfeld. an Australian girl, and it is enormously to her credit that by her sincerity, and also her humour, she makes Judy not only not an unpleasant character, but even lovable —an entirely delightful performance which more than justified the excellent impression formed after the ill-fated “Bees and Honey.” There are amusing moments in this play, but where it fails, I fancy, is that Mr. Levy has attempted to make a comedy from a theme which is essentially not comic.