WAR TIME BALLET

Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 June 1942, Page 4

WAR TIME BALLET

, FLOURISHING IN MOSCOW. CARICATURES OF NAZI LEADERS. The ballet flourishes as strongly in Soviet Moscow as it did in Imperial St., Petersburg, and one of the most popular of recent diversions is a burlesque ballet which guys Hitler. Goering, Goebbels, and Himmler (says the “Manchester Guardian” Miscellany). Perhaps the worst thing of all about it (from the German point of view) .is that each of the four caricatures is danced by a woman which must add a crowning thrust of displeasure for sensitive Nazi Fuhrer-worshippers. That they are sensitive is certain; before the war there used to be protests from Berlin complaining about a lack of proper respect for the Fuhrer as displayed from time to time in the foreign press. For the All-Highest of the Third Reich to be portrayed by a mere ballerina must be the height of infamy. Perhaps the Russian dancers are not only happy in their thrust but happy in its general appreciation on the home front. One has a suspicion that if anything of that sort were attempted in this country there might be some long faces here and there, with protests that life was real and life was earnest and that to show Hitler as a comic figure argued an unbecoming lack of “realism” that was not far removed from wishful thinking. Possibly one advantage of being bitterly and unmistakably engaged in total war, as Russia is, lies in a thankful readiness for laughter if ' cause for laughter can be found.