Lumps in London

A well-known London character named "Professor" Townley Searle last week showered first-nighters at the new Noel Coward play with leaflets protesting its polemical content. Many critics thought he might have saved paper and pencil; they found Peace in Our Time quite innocent of content. Some concluded that melodrama had marked him for her own. But many agreed that Playwright Coward, guided by his personal mental radar, had scored another smash hit.

"Cannot possibly fail," chanted the Daily Telegraph. "Too moving, too, too exciting, too deft--and too timely. We need to be reminded just now that we are people of spirit." Peace in Our Time reminded Britons of the fact like a Churchill war speech played back at double speed.

The action takes place in a Chelsea pub called The Shy Gazelle--in a Britain occupied by the Nazis in 1940. It's a good thing the Germans won, snarls Playwright Janet Braid (handsomely played by Elspeth March), because "we should have been bombed and blitzed and . . . stood up under it--an example to the whole civilized world--and that would have finished us. We should have been smug and proud. . . . In defeat we still have a chance. . . . There'll be no time in this country . . . for class wars and industrial crises and political squabbling . . . until we've driven them away, until we're clean again. . . ." This "message" is re-inked by Coward, who makes the quisling of the play an editor of one of Britain's leftist intellectual weeklies.

After much business of underground meetings and Gestapo agents torturing Englishwomen, the play whoops & hollers to a give-'em-blood climax. With U.S. liberation forces battling through London, the dastardly editor dies alone in the pub while the resistance radio blares God Save the King.

Critic Beverley Baxter of the London Evening Standard (and a member of Parliament in his spare time) recovered in time to write: "This play calls for greatness. It is not there. This theme needs the ennoblement of high tragedy. It is not there. The writing demands a ruthless, artistic integrity. It is not there." But everything was there that the audience had hoped for. As usual, those who submitted themselves trustingly to Coward's showmanship could enjoy an almost continuous throatful of lumps. But next morning, as usual, it was a little hard to remember just what moved you.

However long it ran, Coward's latest would have competition from a flock of Broadway hits that had come to roost in London's West End. The roosters: Oklahoma!, Annie Get Your Gun, Born Yesterday, Life With Father, Deep Are the Roots, The Voice of the Turtle.

All except Life With Father were packing them in. Not since Ike Eisenhower had anything transatlantic been cheered so resoundingly as Oklahoma! and Annie. (Demand for tickets was so great that Princess Elizabeth was told she would probably have to wait two weeks to get eight seats for Annie.) It even seemed likely that they might force a radical change in British musicomedy style.

Critic Baxter's ink turned faintly green as he tried to explain their success: "The Americans are a thorough people, who believe in telephones, plumbing, and efficiency. Being primitive in their approach, they regard the composer as the most important man in a musical production. . . . Pursuing this rigid policy, they demand that a singer can sing, a dancer can dance, that an actor can act, and that the sexes shall be easily distinguishable."

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