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Last week in a letter to Variety from Surrey, England, famed Producer Charles B. Cochran lamented: "I was getting going again, but Hitler put me right out." Others beside Producer Cochran were put out. Of 43 theatres in London, all but 14 were dark, and even among the few plays still on the boards some teetered desperately on the brink. One walloping success of which the West End could boast was the hiss-the-villain Victorian cabaret, "Ridgeway's Late Joys," put on with beer and hot dogs at the Players' Theatre, atop an old five-story house near Covent Garden.

Few English producers have made any plans for new productions; the only fresh play in sight is Women Aren't Angels, a bawdy farce due to leave the suburbs for London this week. More & more producers have turned to revivals of old box-office certainties like Chu-Chin-Chow. Be fore an audience of men in soft shirts, women carrying gas masks, that old historic spectacle last week made its 2,239th performance. Oldsters were disappointed in Lyn Harding's performance in Chu-Chin-Chow, said it didn't stack up with that of beefy Oscar Asche, who played the part for years during and after World War I, when London was teeming with soldiers on leave and shows coined money.

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