Fame Begins at 40

A slapdash London revue called Strike a New Note recently passed its sooth performance thanks to a comic that few Londoners had ever seen a year ago. Today, at 40, raven-haired, bulbous-nosed Sid Field is saluted as perhaps England's finest pantomimist since Charlie Chaplin sailed for the U.S. Fame came late to Field because for twelve years an irksome contract tethered him to the provinces, locked him out of London. It took a lawsuit to get him in.

Field's art resembles Chaplin's--who is Field's idol. It outlaws smut and disdains fast gags, relying on reality lightened by absurdity, on comedy deepened by pathos. But, unlike Chaplin, Field enhances his pantomime with a full set of voices and intonations and the widest mastery of English accents on the English stage. Field has gusto as well. "At last," wrote the Sunday Times's magisterial James Agate, "the stage has an actor who knows how to exuberate."

In Strike a New Note Field is one minute rolling up laughs as a cockney cornet player ("a weedy little buffer . . . half a bully and half a cringer"), the next minute as a suave, Oxford-bred musician who performs on a ramshackle glockenspiel. As a poetry-spouting drunk, he garnishes a skit that contains the show's other drawing card, London's best-known bottle-hymn, I'm Going to Get Lit-Up When the Lights Go Up in London:

When the nations lose their war-sense, and the world gets back its horse-sense

What a day for celebration that will be.

When somebody shouts "The fight's up!"

and "It's time to put the lights up!"

Then the first thing to be lit-up will be

me. . . . You will find me on the tiles, you will

find me wreathed in smiles, I'm going to get so lit-up I'll be visible

for miles.*

Field's blockbuster is a skit sharply satirizing U.S.-British relations, in which Field plays a cocky, cap-askew, cigar-in-mouth, hands-in-pocket, U.S. lieutenant. His stooge, who portrays a full colonel, urges him to try to understand the English better and show more cooperation. The house comes down when the C.O. suggests to Field: "You might even give the British an occasional salute." Aghast, Field mutters: "Ah, no, Colonel, not that!"

* Copyright 1943 by Peter Maurice, Inc. by permission of Shapiro, Bernstein & Co. Inc.

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