Television LIFE OF MISS NIGHTINGALE SKILFUL PICTURE 
The BBC 's dramatised documentary on Florence Nightingale last night cleverly managed to suggest the person behind the legend . 
While never minimising the immensity of her work , it lifted the saintly halo which usually surrounds her name to reveal a warm , dedicated person who accomplished most by perseverance and hard work . 
Most stories of Miss Nightingale begin and end with her work in the Crimea . 
This one started from that point and devoted itself to her lifelong campaign to improve nursing in this country . 
The documentary managed to show the obstacles and her devotion . 
Moira Fraser 's Miss Nightingale was a mixture of the dramatic and the sincere . 
Demure one moment , hard and decisive the next , she caught the dual sides of a complex character . 
The production by Bill Duncalf compressed a long and sometimes rambling story into a concentrated comprehensive survey of a life work . 
P. J. K. FINE SINGING IN HENZE OPERA GLYNDEBOURNE " CONTEMPORARY " From MARTIN COOPER GLYNDEBOURNE , Thursday . 
HANS WERNER HENZE 'S " Elegy for Young Lovers " is the first unambiguously "contemporary " work to be admitted to the Glyndebourne canon . 
By no means a masterpiece , it is in many respects a representative modern work and the composer is a highly skilled manipulator of contemporary idioms , with a strong sense of words and situation . 
The libretto , by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman , is largely a satire on the petty court surrounding an ageing poet , whose deeply egocentric character leads him to sacrifice everything to his need of inspiration . 
Henze obtains his musical characterisation by means of individual instrumental timbres and " personal " intervals , and the result is often less delineation of character than caricature . 
This is also the chief , or at least the most successfully executed trait of the libretto , which contains an odd blend of highly poetic phraseology and schoolboy humour . 
MELODY LACKING 
The composer has a happy gift for musical dialogue as well as for the grotesque , but he is less successful in extended arioso passages . 
The more serious scenes of the opera were in fact often uninteresting owing to the absence of any memorable melodic invention , but an exception was the Poet 's moment of self-revelation in Act 2 , which was excellently sung by Carlos Alexander . 
The lovers , whose chief scene was cut at the last moment , had comparatively little to sing , but Elisabeth So " derstro " m gave an exquisitely touching performance and Andre2 Turp 's ringing voice contrasted well with the character-singing demanded of most of the cast . 
This was in every case excellent . 
Dorothy Dorow 's visionary old madwoman had considerable musical pathos , and Kerstin Meyer struck exactly the right note of hysterical devotion as the Poet 's spinster secretary . 
TOO ENTHUSIASTICALLY 
Thomas Hemsley 's performance as the Poet 's private doctor was dramatically shrewd and musically well conceived . 
The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under John Pritchard handled Henze 's chamber music style rather too enthusiastically at first , so that the singer 's words were largely obscured , and the composer 's very free use of the percussion made this a difficulty throughout . 
Gu " nther Rennert 's imaginative production cleverly conveyed the crazy , precarious atmosphere of the Alpine inn inhabited by the Poet 's court , and his lighting of the later scenes suggested the ultimate isolation in which the Poet finds himself . 
A FASTIDIOUS COMPOSER " JOURNAL " DEBUT AT CHELTENHAM From DONALD MITCHELL CHELTENHAM , Thursday . 
IT was not long ago that Richard Rodney Bennett composed a " Calendar " for chamber ensemble . 
Now he has written a " Journal " for orchestra which was given its first performance in the Town Hall , Cheltenham , to-night by the B.B.C. Symphony Orchestra conducted by Norman Del Mar . 
This new work , cast in five short sections , confirms that Mr. Bennett is one of the most musical of our younger composers . 
He writes , one might say , extremely musical music , of which the sound is fastidiously calculated and yet agreeably spontaneous and imaginative . 
He does not in this " Journal " write one note too many . 
One wonders , rather , whether he has not written too few . 
Or , to state one 's doubt more plainly , one wonders whether the invention in this new work is not a little wanting in substance . 
SLENDER IDEAS 
Brief ideas are welcome indeed if they compress a sizeable thought . 
It struck me that Mr. Bennett 's ideas in this piece were not so much succinct as slender . 
Perhaps it was for this reason that the work seemed somewhat pale in character , a criticism that certainly can not be made of Berg 's very rarely heard Three Orchestral Pieces , Op. 6 each bar of which , even the most derivative , is impregnated with the composer 's personality . 
The cruel acoustics of the hall played havoc with textures which are unusually hectic and congested , but Mr. Del Mar 's heroic labours conveyed a clear impression of the succession of catastrophes which seems to be the work 's natural mode of expression . 
There is undeniably something grand about the way Berg throws so many broken eggs into one basket . 
But one is not entirely convinced that a relaxation of tension might not have secured a more balanced and varied work of art . 
ANGLO-CHINESE PICARESQUE By ROLLA ROUSE The Chinese Bigamy of Mr. David Winterlea : a Manchu-Edwardian Fantasy . 
Translated from the Chinese by Henry McAleavy . 
( Allen & Unwin . 
21s . ) 
THE basis of " The Chinese Bigamy of Mr. David Winterlea , " explains Henry McAleavy , was found among the single-sheet " mosquito-newspapers , " full of " an assortment of anecdotes , topical items , and serial stories , " started in about 1870 by Wang T'ao , assistant to the famous sinologue Dr. Legge . 
Mr. McAleavy 's version of this " Manchu-Edwardian fantasy " is , however , so free that to anybody who knows China and the Chinese nothing of a Chinese flavour remains . 
What the various characters say and do often seems utterly alien to China . 
For example , we are shown a Chinese host placing his principal guest from the Foreign Office in the lowest seat at dinner , accusing him of being homosexual , and generally behaving as no educated Chinese ever could behave . 
Again , the Chinese , whether drunk or sober , never kiss in public , and least of all would a Chinese monk meeting an Englishman for the first time kiss him . 
The period covered by the tale runs from about 1850 to 1913 : and all the characters have one thing in common , their coarse behaviour and abnormal appetites . 
While there is a story meandering through the book , the main object of many chapters is to record some improbable and unpleasant anecdote . 
Amahs into Ladies 
The hero , if such Mr. David Winterlea can be called , tries to turn two Cantonese sisters from amahs into ladies and teach them English : and they on their side plan to marry him jointly and finally to reside , not in unfashionable Kowloon , but in snobbish Hongkong , where he " would have a position to keep up . " 
The main incidents occur on a country estate near London , owned by the Chinese Legation and used by the staff , Chinese and foreign , to amuse themselves , mainly at night . 
BYRON 'S VEXED REPUTE By MARGARET LANE The Late Lord Byron . 
By Doris Langley Moore . 
( Murray . 
2gns . ) 
NEVER has a greater coil been made about any man than about Byron . 
He sowed passions , jealousies , loyalties , scandals , animosities and treacheries as effortlessly as some far worthier characters scatter boredom . 
The tumult is by no means over , and this being a biographical age and Byron a magnificent documenter of his own life , he has reached the stage ( I can not remember any other great literary figure doing so ) when a monumental work can be written on the dramas that seethed and simmered after his death , taking off from the point at which the reader is accustomed to close a poet 's biography . 
Is it really worth while — one is bound to ask the question sooner or later — to devote years of research and over 500 closely printed pages to disentangling the labyrinthine quarrels , blackmails , machinations and correspondences which raged for so many years over Byron 's grave ? 
The answer is , on one condition , that it is ; the condition being that one should have an appetite for detail and for knowing as much as possible about one of the most dynamic geniuses who ever lived . 
Leisured Mischief-Makers 
The evil that Byron did certainly lived after him , and was even outmatched by the mischief perpetrated by almost every person who had been close to him . 
In turning over the bones Doris Langley Moore has brought to light a great deal of discreditable behaviour and a vision of mischief-making propensities of the leisured classes in the early 19th century which leaves one a little breathless . 
No previous Byron biographer , I fancy ( and they have been many ) has had access at the same time to so many important manuscript sources . 
The late Lady Wentworth , Byron 's great-granddaughter , opened the whole of the Lovelace Papers to Mrs. Moore in 1957 ; she was able to continue her work on them for more than a year after Lady Wentworth 's death . 
These papers , the contents of several trunks , are the accumulated letters and personal documents left by Lady Byron , who never recovered from the shock of her brief marriage with the poet , and dedicated the rest of her life ( she was 23 when they parted ) to self-justification and resentment . 
Would that Byron 's Memoirs had also survived ! 
How the ghost of the first John Murray must moan in his Albemarle Street vaults to think how self-righteously , urged and abetted by Byron 's lifelong friend , John Cam Hobhouse , he burned them there in the fireplace , condemning the work unread , as Tom Moore said , " and without opening it , as if it were a pest bag ! " 
Byron 's marriage , the reasons ( real enough though embroidered later ) for Lady Byron 's leaving him , the scandal of his love affair with his half-sister , Augusta Leigh , the question of the paternity of Medora Leigh her daughter , the long inquisitorial persecution of Augusta by Lady Byron ( who seems to have been as neurotic as the most ghoulish novelist could wish ) , the patient ferreting for evidence to add homosexuality to incest as an extra nail in his coffin , the unspeakable treacheries of Lady Caroline Lamb , the scarcely less heinous treacheries of Augusta — it is the Lovelace Papers , surely , that deserve to be called a " pest bag " , not Byron 's consumed Memoirs , which at least would have possessed the merit of being well and entertainingly written . 
Equally important have been the Hobhouse Journals , a vast mass of material partly in the British Museum , partly in the possession of the Hobhouse family in Somerset . 
Hobhouse , later Lord Broughton , was Byron 's intimate ( if a little stuffy and unimaginative ) friend from their Cambridge days , who had travelled widely with him , been fascinated by him to a point that looks like love , had fanned the enthusiasm which had sent Byron finally to Greece , and suffered years of loyal exasperation as Byron 's executor . 
Sturdy Friends 
Byron as a man is seen at his best in relation to such sturdy male friends . 
He brought out the worst in women , as they certainly brought it out in him . 
There is scarcely a woman in his life besides Teresa Guiccioli , last and most reasonable love , who does not affect the modern reader with nausea . 
The Countess Guiccioli was by birth a Gamba ; her brother Pietro accompanied Byron to Greece , shared the misery and ruinous frustrations of the campaign , and was with him when he died . 
The Gamba Papers in Ravenna have shed some valuable light on this last phase , wholesomely contradicting the lies of that strangely theatrical blackguard , Edward Trelawney , who played a highly discreditable part in the Greek campaign himself , and wished , as did many others , to make capital out of his association with Byron . 
A Modern Voice 
Few people come out of this detailed { 6post-mortem with much credit . 
Hobhouse certainly , though one respects him more than one likes him , Byron himself , who , whenever his voice is heard above the banshee wail ( Augusta , Caroline Lamb , Lady Byron keeping in chorus ) surprises one by his tone of humanity , of common sense , of candour : a startlingly modern voice . 
Lady Byron most dislikeable , Augusta a shifty fool and not altogether a nice one , Lady Caroline Lamb a bitch goddess in an age which ( thanks to plentiful domestic service and gracious living ) was notably rich both in goddesses and bitches . 
Masterpiece of horror 
AFTER ten days of intermittent , near fatal ennui , the eleventh Berlin International Film Festival was suddenly jolted back to life by two extraordinary films , Bernhard Wicki 's " { Das Wunder des Malachias " ( " The Miracle of Father Malachias " ) and Michaelangelo Antonioni 's " { La Notte . " 
The number of German film directors who have made first rate works in the last 25 years can be counted on the fingers of one hand : Frank Wysbar ( " { Fa " hrmann Maria " ) , Helmut Ka " utner ( " { Die Grosse Freiheit No. 7 " ) , Herbert Selpin ( " Titanic " ) , Wolfgang Staudte ( " Rotation " ) , and Georg Klaren ( " Wozzeck " ) . 
It would now seem that Wicki 's name must be added to this list , for his new film may well be a landmark in the revitalisation of the German cinema . 
Wicki is not only a director . 
He began his career as an actor , had his first important film ro5le in Ka " utner 's "{ Die letzt Bru " cke , " and he also appears in the new Antonioni film . 
In 1950 he began to take photographs not only in Germany but also in Africa and America . 
An exhibition of these works which is now on view in a Berlin gallery is most impressive . 
As Friedrich Du " rrenmatt , the Swiss playwright and author , wrote : " Wicki 's blacks and greys are not only the colours of the lost and the forgotten , but they are also the technical means of abstraction . 
Every unnecessary detail , all superfluous local colouring must be eliminated . 
He does not want the accuracy of a police photograph , but rather he wants to show the eternal in every instant . " 
The chilling horror of " Malachias " is due as much to Wicki the photographer as to Wicki the director . 
His earlier film , " { Die Bru " cke , " was equally terrifying , but here the director moves out of the world of reality into an icy supernatural vacuum where the sun never shines . 
Following Bruce Marshall 's original novel with considerable fidelity , the film tells the story of a little monk who prays that a disreputable night club near his church be removed . 
One night his prayer is answered and the offending establishment is suddenly transplanted to an island in the North Sea . 
But Father Malachias 's troubles have only begun . 
Instead of having the desired effect , the miracle becomes exploited by a group of shrewd newspapermen . 
Soon a carnival springs up on the sight of the missing building . 
The Church rebukes the poor monk for his miracle , and as a crowning indignity the night club is given a gala society reopening on the island . 
Father Malachias goes to the island , prays , and in a second miracle the night club is replaced in its original setting . 
A summary of the story can give almost no indication of the scope of Wicki 's artistry . 
He tells his story best in the faces of his crowds , recording every wrinkle and drop of sweat with brutal honesty , building up to a tremendous climax in the island orgy . 
Here , the guests arrive in ghost-like yachts , the wildly flapping white sails slashed by the glaring beacon of a lighthouse . 
When the final miracle does occur , it is accepted as a marvellous joke ; no one has learned anything . 
Wicki suddenly returns to the city for a final epilogue . 
In complete silence he shows the faces of people walking in the streets , smug , content , satisfied , and thoroughly frightening . 
Wicki has succeeded in his second film in recording his personal apocalypse of the last days of a sick society . 
It is most unfair to call " Malachias " a cut-rate " { Dolce Vita , " for it is far more intimate and deeply felt . 
In 1944 Herbert Selpin tried a similar feat in " Titanic " by paralleling the last days of the Third Reich with the sinking of the great ocean liner , and paid for his audacity with his life . 
To judge from the press , Wicki is to pay by being journalistically crucified in his own country . 
Certainly there are things wrong with the film , but the print arrived from the cutting room only a few hours before its showing and could not be considered in finished state . 
One can only hope that British audiences will have a chance to judge this powerful creation for themselves in the near future ; " { Die Bru " cke " is still waiting two years after its German premie3re . 
" { La Notte " will be shortly shown in London and for that reason deserves shorter mention here . 
Those who feared that Antonioni could never follow " { L'Avventura " with another masterpiece can rest easy ; he has done the near impossible and turned out what certainly must be one of the greatest studies of the renewal of love that the screen has ever seen . 
Less obviously complex than his last film , " { La Notte " will undoubtedly have more popular appeal , but this is in no way a reflection on its seriousness . 
His method of painting with the camera has never been more exciting , exchanging the rocks of Sicily for the skyscrapers of Milan . 
But his society is the same , now even clearer , but touched with a melancholy compassion which is a strong sign of the maturity of his ultimate artistic vision . 
Strangely enough , the Berlin audience received the film with extreme coolness , much preferring Jean-Luc Godard 's disappointing " { Une Femme est une Femme , " a ninety-one minute hymn to " Vogue , " " { Cahiers du Cinema , " and the worst aspects of the American cinema . 
From a brilliantly funny start , the work fizzles out into a series of repetitious sight-gags and personal jokes incomprehensible to the uninitiated ( including four plugs for Charles Aznavour ) . 
Certainly one had the right to expect better . 
The other French entry , Michel Drach 's " { Ame2lie , ou de Temps d'Aimer , " was late nineteenth-century French opera at its most beautiful , subtly romantic with a twilight melancholy which lifted an involved story to real heights . 
As a refuge from the welter of mediocre features , the retrospective shows are always of great interest , particularly the programmes devoted to the works of Richard Oswald . 
This director is at last being re-evaluated and given his proper place in the history of the German film . 
Most charming was his tongue-in-cheek " { Unheimliche Geschichten " ( 1920 ) , five ghost stories with a light touch , and there was much to admire in " Dreyfus " ( 1930 ) and the virtually unknown but extremely important " 1914 " ( 1931 ) , which tries to show that it took more than just Germany to start the First World War . 
Prizes being what they are , Berlin is unusually generous in giving everyone something , and silver bears are awarded in every direction . 
Both the Antonioni and Wicki films took high honours , and the audience at the awards was particularly enthusiastic when one Miss Anna Kerima was selected as best actress for her work in the Godard film . 
Gifted with an interesting face , although little acting ability , she would seem to be well worth watching in the months to come . 
NEW FILMS by Isabel Quigly 
FOR once a cinema 's advertisement does not exaggerate . 
The Academy advertises Jean-Luc Godard 's { A bout de Souffle2 ( translated as Breathless , X certificate ) as " the most eagerly awaited new film of the { 6nouvelle vague , " and although " new " is hardly accurate ( the film is two years old and one of those that gave the new wave its original impetus and excitement ) , certainly the film that " Sight and Sound " called " the group 's intellectual manifesto " is one that anyone with an interest in what the cinema is up to has been waiting to see . 
Few films have been so widely discussed before their public showing ; and , as it turns out , few can ever have seemed such obvious prototypes , or have embodied so many attitudes and techniques that have since been imitated , exaggerated , caricatured , and ( therefore ) weakened , even made absurd . 
It is disappointing though perhaps inevitable that the young directors of the new wave made their best films at the beginning , and in most cases , far from going from strength to strength , have since either repeated themselves or deteriorated or ( generally ) both ; for their great limitation is the lack , once they have made their original point and asserted their independence of what went before them , of anything much to say , and the fact that the world they deal with , though at first it may look excitingly emancipated , is in fact as restricted as that of drawing-room comedy . 
Its centre of gravity is Paris , its inhabitants young people — students , spivs , petty crooks , layabouts of every kind — all with a uniform sort ( and style ) of sexual promiscuity and social aimlessness . 
HERE in London in 1961 , we are seeing " { A bout de Souffle2 " too late , of course , to feel its original impact , or even its originality very forcefully : but even a short time ago it must have seemed excitingly new , even revolutionary , one of the films that , sick of the old guard 's deadness , stageyness , and sheer lack of film sense , started what was then an anti-cliche2 movement , a new way of looking at the world . 
But there is a gloomy truth in the old saws about revolutionaries turning into conservatives overnight : it is not that they are bribed or bludgeoned by the establishment , but that they turn into an establishment of their own . 
In no time at all their very revolutionary qualities are copied , and appear quite dismally hackneyed : what was once fresh and surprising becomes tricksy and affected , and by now , in the case of the new wave , the movement is so barnacled with its own cliche2s that it is hard to remember the high — inordinately high — hopes it began with . 
Certainly "{ A bout de Souffle2 " ( which is almost a group achievement : Godard directed , but Truffaut — " { Les 400 coups , " " Shoot the pianist " — wrote the script and Chabrol — " The cousins , " " { Les bonnes femmes " — was technical supervisor ) is extremely exciting , especially if you can forget what has come since . 
It has now the familiar ingredients — a nihilistic attitude to everything , wry , built-in jokes , a murderer-thief hero — but it has , too , a startling freshness of style , a really surprising and illuminating way of looking at objects , faces , people as they talk and feel , conversations as they perform ( or do n't manage to perform ) their function of bringing people closer . 
It has a great look of speed and technical fun about it , of enormous cinematic enjoyment , and above all of cinematic sense . 
Much of it has that air of improvisation , as of off-the-cuff living , that once seemed so new and so attractive . 
The story ( not that the story , in the sense of plot , matters much ; but in the sense of situation and movement it matters a lot ) is that of a man on the run ( Jean-Paul Belmondo ) , who spends a few days with an American girl ( Jean Seberg ) who is bearing his child ( though paternity is always a rather dubious business among the new wave ) : an affair that remains spiritually unconsummated as they move on to the final betrayal . 
BELMONDO reappears at the Paris Pullman in { Moderato Cantabile ( curiously translated into Seven Days ... 
Seven Nights ... 
A certificate ) , Peter Brook 's film made in France and shown last autumn at the London Film Festival . 
In spite of magnificent performances from him and from Jeanne Moreau , this has been fairly well trounced by the critics wherever it has appeared . 
Leisurely , even slow , rhythmically repetitive , the mysteriously simple story takes place on the banks of the Garonne , which becomes an unforgettable image . 
This is a very individual film , mannered , subtle , literary , made by a man who is not necessarily a film-maker , without the exclusively , ferociously cinematic eye of , say , Godard or Truffaut ; but , to me at least , strangely satisfying and memorable . 
And for those who complain that Hollywood has grown too sophisticated to turn out anything really amusingly bad these days , anything like the old riproaring nonsenses in which Joan Crawford or Lana Turner broke their hearts in black velvet and mink , there is Parrish ( director : Delmer Daves , A certificate : Warner ) , a concoction as absurd as you could hope for , and a parody of every family saga and regional-folksy film from giant downwards . 
With a large blond youth of quite dazzling dumbness called Troy Donahue ; and Claudette Colbert , still charming amid the nonsense , and Karl Malden not knowing how to take it , all rolling eyeballs like a villain from East Lynne . 
Film Virtues in A Taste of Honey Mr. Richardson 's Skilful Direction 
The film version of Miss Shelagh Delaney 's play A Taste of Honey opens at the Leicester Square Theatre tomorrow . 
It has been produced and directed by Mr. Tony Richardson , who is also part-author with Miss Delaney of the script , and the great advantages to be derived from this unity of conception and control are everywhere apparent . 
This is not a filmed play . 
It has been conceived throughout in terms of the cinema , and again and again it is the visual qualities of the story , and the marriage of the central characters to their background , which bring the film so vividly to life . 
In Fanny , which also has its premiere tomorrow , the director , Mr. Joshua Logan , attempted but failed to create the atmosphere of a city . 
In A Taste of Honey Mr. Richardson has taken a town in the industrial North of England and has made it live . 
The shabby streets and wet pavements , the school play-grounds , the public monuments and the rubbish strewn canals — even the worn head-stones in the churchyard , " sacred to the memory of " — are seen as an integral part of the story . 
The background is always alive and always changing ; but the visual image is in keeping with the spoken word . 
We accept implicitly that these characters have grown naturally and inevitably from out of these surroundings . 
Against this industrial setting Mr. Richardson has told Miss Delaney 's story . 
Its faults are still apparent . 
The plot is still shapeless and inconclusive — indeed it is little more than an anecdote of city life , with a beginning but no end — and the characters often seem to lack consistency . 
But there is heart in the telling , and an intense realism in the situation . 
A young girl lives in a single dingy room with her slatternly , promiscuous mother . 
In such surroundings she learns sex is something sordid , and when she experiences it for the first time herself it is incoherently , clumsily , but half shyly and half inquisitively . 
As is the case in Fanny her first lover is a sailor who leaves her to bear his child and sails away . 
In Fanny the pregnant girl is befriended by an old man . 
Here it is a young homosexual , estranged from women but yet moved by a strong maternal instinct to the unborn child as much as to the expectant mother , who acts as a protector and comforter to her in her hour of need . 
He shares her room and gives her his forlorn gift of companionship and sympathy — " you need someone to love you while you are looking for someone to love " . 
Miss Dora Bryan plays the mother as a flamboyant , down-to-earth sensualist who lacks perception but is not altogether without heart . 
Mr. Murray Melvin is the homosexual , his long lugubrious face reflecting a hidden and unexpressed compassion . 
Miss Rita Tushingham is the girl . 
It is always difficult when assessing a moving and eloquent performance by a young and immature screen actress to judge the extent to which her acting has been inspired by skilled and sensitive direction . 
Mr. Richardson has left his stamp so clearly on the rest of this film that some credit must be given to him ; but here is undeniably a performance of surprising range and deep emotion , reflected in the face of an ordinary schoolgirl that is seemingly without make-up but is illuminated by a wonderful pair of eyes . 
It is Mr. Richardson 's great gift that he can show a face in close-up and reveal the thoughts of the mind without a word being spoken . 
This he does repeatedly in this film , especially with Miss Tushingham . 
CONCERTOS ENLIVEN PROGRAMME 
Apart from Tchaikovsky 's Romeo and Juliet fantasy overture , last night 's Prom was entirely devoted to twentieth-century music , with two piano concertos by Alan Rawsthorne and Prokofiev ( each composer 's No. 1 in the medium ) to enliven both halves of the programme . 
The two works are true bravura concertos lying within the grasp only of players of virtuoso technique ; they are alike , too , in placing far more emphasis on crisply sparkling extravert brilliance than on inwardness of feeling though admittedly Rawsthorne briefly becomes more searching in his beautiful central chaconne . 
The soloist , Miss Moura Lympany , could not have been better chosen , for she has the clear-cut agility and vivacity of musicianship necessary for this kind of music , and temperamentally does not suffer from any temptation to delve more deeply into the notes than they warrant . 
On their own , the B.B.C. Symphony Orchestra and Sir Malcolm Sargent went to the rescue of " Pohjola 's Daughter " , one of Sibelius 's offspring now very much on the shelf . 
This is vividly scored but essentially naive programme music , perhaps more likely to appeal on home ground where the Kalevala is as real as the Bible . 
Sir Malcolm Sargent and the orchestra made every point with graphic clarity , and almost the same was true of Vaughan Williams 's sixth symphony , which stood as the centrepiece of the programme . 
The exception was the finale of the symphony , which was played just a shade too fast and not quite insubstantially enough to convey the full , hollow horror of its implications — the globe 's vast desolation after the extinction of all human life . 
Miss Dodie Smith Provides for Kitchen Sink FROM OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT LIVERPOOL , SEPT. 12 . 
In her latest play , launched here last night , Miss Dodie Smith , accepting the challenge of the times , has made room for a kitchen sink . 
Its presence does nothing to sour these new arrivals among the author 's brood of brain children . 
Or should one call them heart children ? 
All their hearts are in the right place , and they run true and sweet to family form . 
There is even an older and more formidable challenge than the sink itself to test their fundamental niceness , for this basement kitchen of an old house in a London square is also the dining room of a boarding establishment run by an amiable and fluttery spinster . 
All her guests , whatever their age , lend a hand with the washing up ( which is frequent ) with almost as much enjoyment as if at last some miraculous detergent were being advertised in the live theatre . 
No one is cantankerous , there are no petty jealousies or mutual animosities . 
Who but Miss Dodie Smith would have thought boarding house comedy could be written without them ? 
This boarding house has a pronounced list to stageward . 
It accommodates young members of the profession and also a middle-aged actor manque2 who has been out of touch with the world for 20 years and is at first suspected of having been serving a prison sentence . 
Actually he has been caring for his invalid but equally histrionic wife who has died and left him free to fulfil , with her blessing , his long thwarted ambition . 
When he has been gently de-hammed for the modern stage by a young actress who is his fellow-lodger he does land a contract . 
In the meanwhile we watch him perform marvels of cooking and , generally at the same time , listen to him delivering the most purple and familiar patches of Shakespeare . 
There are a pair of pathetic fuddy-duddies who have parted with their house because they have had " a good offer " for it , and a hypochondriacal old bachelor who proposes to the gentle proprietress , but is not accepted until she has made the surprising confession that she , unlike her once suspected guest , has really been to prison . 
This is Miss Smith 's highest flight of imagination ; the offence was the absentminded theft of a library book for which in her youth the otherwise innocent Miss Edie got 14 days without the option . 
The inclusion of a titled " char " on the establishment is perhaps the most deliberately modern touch . 
Miss Jennifer Stirling plays Miss Edie with great skill and charm and Mr. Willard Stoker effectively coordinates a good cast . 
Rare Acting in Betti Play A Quietly Effective Production Oxford Playhouse : Irene Directed by BRYAN STONEHOUSE FROM OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT OXFORD , Sept. 12 
Irene is not perhaps one of Betti 's masterpieces , but it is a splendidly efficient play , constructed with sure instinct for theatrical effect which never seemed to let this dramatist down . 
The background is that rough , raw , savage land of southern Italy which Betti explored in a number of plays . 
Here it is combined with another theme dear to his heart , the workings of justice . 
A nice , simple sergeant of the Carabinieri arrives in a strange village at night to investigate some irregularities concerning the town clerk . 
By chance he lights first of all upon the clerk 's house , stays there for the night and becomes disturbingly involved with the clerk , his faded , pretentious wife and , particularly , his beautiful crippled daughter , Irene . 
The next morning he hears the evidence against his erstwhile host , and learns of the bitter enmity in which the mayor and the rest hold him . 
Where does the truth lie ? 
How far can the sergeant , caught between his feelings for Irene and her family on the one hand and the evidence and the veiled blackmail of the mayor on the other reach a fair and unbiased decision ? 
Especially when he learns that the girl , whom he believed pure and innocent , is in fact the local prostitute . 
Despite this she still retains a strange innocence , somewhere between that of the idiot and that of the saint , which sets up violent and contradictory emotions in those who visit her as well as in the sergeant : they want her to go and yet they want her to stay ; he does not know until almost too late whether he loves her or loathes her . 
Arguably , the dramatist has committed a technical error in allowing Irene to speak for herself ; we would be altogether clearer in our minds about her if she remained a flawed but beautiful enigma , seen but not heard . 
However , Miss Pinkie Johnstone makes her few brief scenes effective , and Mr. Dinsdale Landen , in the longest and most exacting role , that of the sergeant , gives a performance of rare intelligence and restrained power . 
Mr. Bryan Stonehouse 's production is quietly effective , giving full value to the formal elements of Betti 's writing without over-emphasizing them . 
A MORALITY PLAY ON AMBITION 
Last night 's play in the " Play of the Week " series on independent television , Then We Fall , by Mr. Paul Ferris , was a morality on the not unfamiliar theme of the destructive power of unbridled ambition . 
It went , perhaps , some distance beyond most treatments of its subject by attempting to generate a melodramatic inevitability which left its central character and the world around him in complete , unredeemable desolation . 
We could , perhaps , say whether or not the attempt succeeded if we had a little more faith in the way in which Mr. Ferris manipulated his characters . 
Mervyn Morris abandons his job as a pilot in a Welsh seaport , finds a position with the local paper , treads underfoot everyone , especially his wife , with whom he deals : his wife leaves him for the paper 's shy , gentle editor . 
At which he prevails upon his father-in-law , a miserly , fanatical Welsh nationalist , to murder the editor for him . 
No suspicions are aroused but no problems are solved for he loses his job because , at the moment of the murder , he is standing in front of television cameras and , with his nerves on edge , talking tactlessly . 
Mr. William Lucas ( Morris ) is always insensitively pushing , Miss Sheila Allen his wife , always palely appealing , Mr. James Maxwell , the editor , always comically abashed by the events , and Mr. Aubrey Richards , the father-in-law , always comically grotesque ; they were not asked to modulate from their set moods but played with proper efficiency and , in the case of Mr. Richards , with lavish and suitably gaudy colour . 
Only Mr. Lucas 's actions , therefore , arose explicably from appreciable motives . 
The rest , one feels , were driven to effective action by the author in spite of the ineffectuality with which he had endowed them . 
One hopes that he is not asking us to believe that , because of their odd accents , they act oddly like the queer foreigners of tradition . 
FRANKLY , IT 'S NOT FOR FRANKIE ... 
NEXT month that friendly , effervescent performer Frankie Vaughan will burst on to the London Palladium stage in a new show . 
To paraphrase his well-known ditty : " He 'll have the limelight , they 'll give him the girls — and leave the rest to him . " 
I have a hunch that he will feel more at home in the old , star-studded West End than he will ever feel in Hollywood . 
His American bosses , 20th-Century Fox , have recently given Frankie the full , razzamataz , red-carpet treatment . 
But they have n't done a thing for his film career that Anna Neagle and Herbert Wilcox were not doing better here , before the platinum-plated Hollywood carrot was dangled before his nose . 
In his first Hollywood picture , " Let's Make Love , " he was swamped by the know-how of Marilyn Monroe and Yves Montand . 
Against this couple Frankie , in a cardboard role , did n't stand a chance . 
Now comes " The Right Approach " ( Rialto , " A " ) , and it 's a glum business . 
He plays an aspiring actor — a selfish , arrogant , brash , ambitious , unscrupulous heel — who would tread on anybody 's neck to get a break in the Hollywood ratrace . 
Cynical 
He double-crosses the five pals with whom he lives , cheats a waitress ( Juliet Prowse ) and cynically uses a magazine editress ( Martha Hyer ) to get ahead . 
Frankie Vaughan is too nice a chap to ring quite true as a smooth-tongued , ill-mannered Yank . 
His best moments are when he swings breezily into the title song . 
But 6,000 miles seems a heck of a way to go for a new hit song . 
He might be well advised to think hard and long before his next jump into the Hollywood arena . 
VERDICT : Vaughan should have by-passed this approach . 
RONALD Lewis has just left for his first taste of the Hollywood treatment , thanks to a sound performance in " Taste of Fear " ( Warner Theatre , " X " ) . 
He has earned his break . 
The film is a well-made variation on that sinister yarn in which half the cast try to persuade the heroine that she is out of her mind . 
Despite flagrant cheating the eerie atmosphere is built up neatly . 
Susan Strasberg is the crippled damsel in distress . 
Stepmother Ann Todd and doctor Christopher Lee are also effectively around . 
They provide some chilly red herrings in this " Find-the-body " thriller . 
VERDICT : Do n't believe all you see and hear ! 
NOT for the first time the homely mug of Sidney James has pumped life into a slim , strained comedy . 
He does his rescue act in " Double Bunk " ( Leicester-square Theatre , " A " ) . 
Strength 
Navigator Sid is a tower of strength when newly-weds Ian Carmichael and Janette Scott let loose their ancient houseboat on a honeymoon trip down the river . 
The film starts off brightly enough but , half-way through , the plot ( as well as the boat ) springs a near-disastrous leak . 
Familiar members of Britain 's repertory team of comedy character-actors jump through equally familiar hoops to mild laughter . 
VERDICT : The " bunk " needed doubling . 
DONALD "TAKES " THE EVENING LAST NIGHT 'S T V by CLIFFORD DAVIS 
DONALD HOUSTON had a big success on A T V 's " Drama '61 " last night as a smooth , scheming jewel thief in a play by Jacques Gillies , " The Takers . " 
A polished production by Quentin Lawrence , here , held together by Mr. Houston 's accomplished performance as the master mind behind a gang of crooks . 
This plot to rob a French millionaire of £300,000 worth of jewellery struck me as ingenious . 
The play had style , moved at a quick pace and everyone did well . 
But it was Mr. Houston 's evening . 
Earlier , on the Palladium show I found Stanley Holloway 's act too long and not particularly entertaining . 
It was also a mistake to re-book Gene Detroy and his performing chimpanzees so soon after their previous appearance . 
Their offering last night differed little from their earlier act on this show a week or so ago . 
But the Mudlarks , with Jeff Mudd out of the Army and back with sister Mary and brother Fred , were in bright , zestful form . 
Why only two numbers , though ? 
It was not enough . 
A Rix mix by RICHARD SEAR 
" A FAIR COP , " the B B C Whitehall farce last night , looked like a rabbit warren in a field of corn . 
I ca n't recall a production where so many comics bolted in and out of holes so often . 
The jokes were a reshuffle of the same old lot — this time Brian Rix lost his skirt instead of his trousers . 
The action moved at tremendous speed , backed by some wonderful timing by the cast . 
I especially liked the tea-cup scene where six of the cast changed cups with the dexterity of Chinese jugglers . 
Carole Shelley as the newly-wed and Larry Noble as Smiler Perkins were the most laughable . 
They alone used a sharp edge to their humour and cut through the gormless standing corn around them . 
Perhaps it was accidental — I hope not . 
If ever a bag of humour needed a thorough shaking up the Whitehall farce is it when it comes to television . 
IT 'S AN OLD PIANNA PIN-UP ON THE RECORD by Patrick Doncaster 
HOW do you get on records ? 
Well , you 've got to have something different . 
Sing slightly flat . 
All the good singers sing in tune . 
Twang a guitar slightly off key . 
Everybody 's fed up with the right way — so the best-seller charts say . 
Play an OLD pianna instead of a new one . 
You got to get it into your head , son ... people do n't like things as they should be — not on record , anyway . 
Thus , musician David Lisbon 's chances of being a starred disc solo pianist were greatly enhanced when he dug out A PACKET OF DRAWING-PINS . 
" Why not , " thought ex-soldier Mr. Lisbon , who is twenty-three , and lives in Dagenham , Essex , " press a thumb-tack into the nose of the hammers that strike the piano strings ? " 
He did , on his piano at home . 
There were n't enough tacks and he got only the middle hammers done . 
Then he tried it out for sound . 
Um-chink ... um-chink ... it went . 
Slightly flat and jangly in part . 
DELIGHTFUL ! 
He put the sound on tape . 
The tape went to the Philips company . 
Within two days Mr. Lisbon had a record contract . 
And they hauled his thumb-tacked joanna the thirteen miles to London for his first session . 
Now along comes his solo disc , featuring two of his own compositions , " Deerstalker " and " Almost Grown Up . " 
VERDICT : Mr. Lisbon has it taped . 
And tacked . 
And he says : " Just as well I had only one box of tacks — it might have been so different .... " 
More news from the ivory-thumping dept .... 
Russ Conway , who has tinkled his way to fame on an old pianna , comes in with another of his own works : " Parade of the Poppets " ( Columbia ) . 
But not one of his nimble-fingered best . 
CUTE 
GERMANY 'S Russ Conway is a pianist who calls himself CRAZY OTTO . 
But nothing crazy about his pianistics . 
He pounds merrily away at a piece called " Piccadilly " ( Polydor ) . 
I find it cute . 
American pianist Floyd Cramer , who played for Elvis on " It 's Now or Never , " looks like having a success on his own with " On the Rebound " ( RCA ) . 
NEW boy on the vocal front is Rolly Daniels , who comes 5,000 miles from India to seek disc fame . 
Comedian Hal Monty saw him in Bombay , became his manager . 
And such is Hal 's faith that he brings him to Europe . 
Now Rolly gets his big break — a record , the modern Aladdin 's lamp of show business . 
Become a success with a disc and hey presto ! 
You 're a star .... 
Rolly sings with assuredness " Bella Bella Marie " ( Parlophone ) , a lively song that changes tempo mid-way . 
I do n't think he will storm the charts with this one , but it 's a good start . 
CHRIS CHARLES , 39 , who lives in Stockton-on-Tees , is an accountant . 
He is also a director of a couple of garages . 
And he finds time as well to be a lyric writer . 
OBLIGED 
He writes with Tolchard Evans , composer of " Lady of Spain " and other big hits . 
Tolch , as he is known in Tin Pan Alley , likes songs with a month in the title . 
He wrote "My September Love , " the big David Whitfield hit of 1956 . 
" Let's have another song with a month in it , " said Tolch . 
Mr. Charles obliged with " April Serenade . " 
This week it appears , a tuneful melody sung impeccably by Robert Earl ( Philips ) . 
TELEPAGE by JACK BELL A PRODUCER VANISHES 
PRODUCER Russell Turner , 33 , provides his last programme for the B B C tonight with Robert Harbin 's " Mystery and Magic " ( 7.30 ) . 
After six years with the Corporation , during which he started " Juke Box Jury " and directed " Six-Five Special , " Turner is aiming to go into free-lance T V , film and stage production work . 
" I feel I 've done all I can at the B B C , " he told me . 
" We mutually agreed to part . " 
Escapologist Dill-Russell is a guest in Harbin 's show tonight . 
Boxing fans can see an eight-round feather-weight contest between Chris Elliot and Harry Carroll from Leicester ( B B C , 8.25 ) . 
" NATIONAL " AIRS 
A SONGS-OF-BRITAIN medley is sung by David Hughes in his " Make Mine Music " ( B B C , 9.30 p.m . ) . 
The numbers include " Scotland the Brave , " " Men of Harlech , " " McNamara 's Band , " " Greensleeves " and " English Rose . " 
Fay Compton stars in " No Hiding Place " ( I T V , 9.35 p.m . ) . 
She plays the possessive mother of a man whose hobby revolves round a doll 's house . 
THREE people will be hypnotised in tonight 's "Lifeline " ( B B C , 10.15 ) . 
They will be asked to comment on the design of everyday articles such as a chair and a motor-car . 
WHAT ? 
The idea is to see what happens when parts of the mind not normally available without hypnosis are used . 
I T V have postponed Malcolm Muggeridge 's " Appointment with playwright Arnold Wesker . " 
Instead , Muggeridge 's appointment will be with Sir Roy Welensky the Premier of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland ( 10.30 p.m . ) . 
Say Granada T V , the producers : " We decided to make the switch because of the topicality of African affairs . 
The Wesker interview will be seen at a later date . " 
LAST NIGHT 'S TV The soldier who was scared by RICHARD SEAR 
ACTOR Tom Courtenay was an outstanding success last night in I T V 's " Private Potter , " his first big T V part . 
The play was a brilliantly-written essay on soldiering which stated that a fighting man could only be regarded as a machine . 
Potter screamed during an action , and was arrested . 
He claimed he had seen a vision of God — only the padre and his C O believed him . 
Courtenay played the part with a gawky , Northern defiance . 
The cameras played continuously on his craggy face , and obstinate , baffled eyes . 
They stripped him of his ugly battle-dress , to leave him for what he was — Potter , a frightened boy who had a vision . 
It was a splendid interpretation of the part . 
The rest of the cast were well chosen , with James Maxwell making a fine job of the sympathetic C O. IMPOSSIBLE ? — NO ! 
Paul Daneman gave another first-class performance last night as a wartime naval officer in the B B C 's " The Little Key . " 
The play was no more than a figment of the imagination which asked the viewer to believe in a beautiful ghost . 
It would have been an impossible piece of television but for clever production by Michael Hayes . 
He captured the atmosphere of fog and mystery to great effect . 
" NOT FAIR " say VIEWERS LAST NIGHT 'S T V by RICHARD SEAR 
MORE than 100 viewers complained to the B B C last night that an American film , " Britain — Blood , Sweat , and Tears ... 
Plus Twenty Years , " was anti-British . 
The film replaced " What 's My Line ? " and " Be My Guest " programmes because of an electricians ' strike . 
It showed Britain today through the eyes of an American T V reporter , Eric Sevareid , and British personalities . 
Among them — Professor Dennis Brogan , Shelagh Delaney , and Alan Sillitoe . 
The film covered a wide aspect of the British scene , ranging from pubs , the Eton wall game , to the European Common Market . 
Shelagh Delaney and Alan Sillitoe attacked education . 
It was left to reporter Sevareid to make the strongest criticisms . 
He said that in the race of the modern nations , Britain was slipping behind .... 
Fine Classical Chorus Imparting Ritual Significance 
Scala Theatre : The Choephori . 
Though Mr. Dimitrios Rondiris 's ideas about the use of material from folksong and folkdance in accommodating a classical chorus to the modern stage had some chances of expression in his production of the Sophocles Electra last week , the real test comes with the Aeschylian equivalent , The Choephori , and its tailpiece , The Eumenides , which make up the second programme of the Greek Tragedy Theatre 's season . 
For the role of the chorus here is much more important and active , particularly in The Eumenides , than it ever is in Sophocles , and the ritual element in the drama , always a stumbling block for modern audiences , is much closer to the surface . 
In the first play the chorus are embodiments of right judgment in the abstract , applying the tests of religion to the situations before them and urging the characters to the proper actions even when these , mere individual human beings , may be torn by doubt . 
In the second they become the Furies , the embodiments of one aspect of the divine vengeance , which pursues the slayer of his own kind , even if that slaughter was divinely ordained , and finally the impersonal prophets of universal reconciliation . 
Mr. Rondiris 's handling of the chorus here is masterly throughout : in The Choephori they still perform the function of sympathetic decor , as in Electra , but if anything with more subtlety and control , and when their measured speech passes over into song the tones are , remotely but unmistakably , those taught by the Orthodox liturgy — the readiest way of imparting ritual significance to their words for a modern audience . 
In The Eumenides they are different again ; as the Furies pursuing Orestes they take a direct part in the action , and are thus required to project emotions of their own instead of merely reflecting the emotions of the central characters . 
Savage and weirdly masked , they swirl in a turbulent mass about the stage , eschewing until the very end the regular , balanced compositions of the earlier play . 
The human beings involved in the intricate working out of divine justice are relatively less important than in later Greek tragedy , but they are strongly played by actors with whom we are already familiar from Electra . 
The protagonist in both plays is Orestes , and Mr. D. Veakis has more chance than he had in the Sophocles to win us over to his rather exaggerated style of acting , though he still does not quite succeed . 
The Electra and Clytemnestra of this earlier production have changed places this time ( presumably so that Miss Aspassia Papathanassiou could appear in both plays , as Clytemnestra and her ghost ) . 
Miss Thalia Kalliga 's Electra is as impressive as her Clytemnestra , but inevitably Miss Papathanassiou with her incandescent pallor and the vibrant intensity of her stage presence seizes our attention every moment she is on the scene and it is a measure of her power over the whole production that when the curtain finally descends it is not the harmony of the close , but Clytemnestra 's ghost crying in the night for vengeance , which remains most potently in our minds . 
FINE EXHIBITION OF SPORTING PRINTS AGE OF THE COLOURED AQUATINT 
The exhibition of English and French engravings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at Messrs. Agnew 's Galleries , 43 , Old Bond Street , until July 8 , is a pleasant reminder mainly of the age of the coloured aquatint though it includes also examples of the delicate French line-engravings after Moreau le Jeune from { Le Monument de Costume . 
It represents in impressions of excellent quality such famous prints as Debucourt 's " { La Promenade Publique " of 1792 , the view of Westminster Hall and Abbey engraved by D. Havell after J. Glendall , and the now rare coaching subjects of James Pollard of which " The Royal Mails preparing to start for the West of England , 1831 " ( from the " Swan with Two Necks " , Cheapside ) is a notable example . 
Joseph Farington gains from translation into aquatint in the plates from Boydell 's " History of the River Thames " and some interesting views of early nineteenth century Greece include an aquatint of the Parthenon ( Dodwell-Bennett ) as it must have appeared shortly after Lord Elgin had removed the " Marbles " . 
The sporting prints by Herring and Alken are good examples of an always popular genre . 
PICTORIAL CONFECTIONS 
Closely alike in style , the pictures of Dietz Edzard and Suzanne Eisendieck may be suitably described as " confections " and the sugared quality the word implies pervades the current exhibition of their work at the Adams Gallery , 24 , Davis Street , W.1 , giving to views of Venice and Normandy a charm curiously remote from reality . 
The idyllic combination of figure and landscape in which these artists have specialized needs a sweet tooth of appreciation . 
The exhibition continues until June 30 . 
Moral Earnestness in Ballet 
The social and aesthetic climate of Soviet ballet is so different from our own that in considering Russian ballet today we start at a considerable disadvantage . 
The sense of moral earnestness , the view that art should be a guide and mentor for the people , which is the substructure of Soviet choreography , can produce effects which will strike us as naive or old-fashioned ; yet this would not perhaps be so important were it not for the fact that the use made of dance movement and of performers must necessarily reflect this same feeling . 
The choreographic manner — where the hero 's leaps are an affirmation of faith , and the heroine , held aloft , is woman-kind as a triumphant inspiration and reward for the hero 's endeavours — has an initial excitement which too often declines into dramatic cliche2 , to the detriment of our western enjoyment of the dancing as a stage spectacle . 
These are the very faults of The Stone Flower with which the Leningrad State Kirov Ballet opened their season at Covent Garden last night . 
The plot tells of a stone-cutter , Danila , loving a young girl , Katerina , and dissatisfied with his art . 
His longing to create a perfect stone flower takes him to a magical cavern , presided over by the Mistress of the Copper Mountain . 
There he learns the secrets of his craft , and there Katerina comes at last to fetch him away from the Mistress of the Mountain , who reluctantly lets him go . 
It is , baldly , an uneven work , but even in our limited experience of Soviet ballet , an interesting one , and an unusual departure from anything we have seen previously from Russia . 
Gone is the realist de2cor ; instead , a back drop rises to reveal the various changes for scenes which are otherwise played on a bare stage and with simple black wings . 
The choreography is the first major creation of the young Yuri Grigorovich , and it demonstrates a talent not as yet up to the demands of a large work . 
For Danila and Katerina he uses a free-flowering classicism , while for the Mistress of the Mountain he has devised a quasi-acrobatic style , sinuous , angular , and very brilliant . 
He is most successful in adapting folk-dancing for the chorus of peasants and gipsies , and he shows a remarkable gift for movement for a large corps , dazzling , intricate , and with a muscular brio that is enormously effective . 
But against this we have to set scenes for the { 6corps de ballet of jewels that seem fidgety and sterile exercises in academic movement , lacking any originality . 
The three principals are admirable : as Danila , Mr. Yuri Soloviev gives a tremendous performance ; he has a prodigious technique in leaps and turns , he is a fine partner , and conveys that sense of dramatic conviction that can disarm our criticism of a character that is not fully explored in the ballet . 
As Katerina and the Mistress of the Mountain Miss Alla Sizova and Miss Alla Osipenko are well contrasted , with Miss Sizova 's warm lyrical style matched against the force and e2clat of Miss Osipenko . 
The company are seen best in the character dances ; as peasants and gypsies in a fair scene that inevitably recalls Petrushka they show just how much dramatic variety can be obtained from a superb corps . 
In the " classical " sequences we can only appreciate the difference that still exists between Leningrad and Moscow dancers ; here is a style that seems nearer our own , more reserved and less emotionally extreme than the Bolshoi . 
The Prokofiev score , magnificently handled by Mr. Niazi , is adequate as ballet music , but a first hearing does not reveal it as of the standard of Romeo and Juliet , or even as appealing as Cinderella . 
WIDE COLOUR ON HARPSICHORD MISS SILVIA KIND 'S RECITAL 
In spite of the harpsichord 's popularity , true harpsichordists these days are very rare . 
Miss Silvia Kind , who played a varied and consistently interesting programme at Wigmore Hall last night , can hardly be considered one just yet . 
An attack of nerves in Bach 's Italian Concerto caused her to take the outer movements at perilously fast tempi with scarcely a thought for any detailed phrasing of their melodic lines ; if at the start of a recital this could be forgiven , her reliance on colour effects to underline the structure of the music — which unfortunately persisted throughout much of the remainder of it — most certainly could not . 
The expressive powers of a harpsichord are by no means directly proportionate to the number of registrations it possesses . 
In some seventeenth-century programme pieces by John Bull , Bernardo Pasquini and Alessandro Poglietti the employment of a wide variety of colour { 6per se seemed appropriate enough ; in Mozart , however ( the Duport variations K.573 ) , such superficial treatment chopped up the music altogether too much . 
But the performance of Bach 's D major Toccata BWV 912 , with which Miss Kind ended her recital , combined some splendidly bold and free declamatory playing with keen perception of the work 's continuity and nobility of outline . 
It suggested , in fact , that Miss Kind is a very much better harpsichordist than this recital as a whole revealed . 
UNEQUAL SUPPORT FOR THREE AUTHORS 
Webber-Douglas School : Triple Bill 
Thirteen second-year students appeared in last night 's performance , and one 's judgment of them might have been fairer , if the running order of the programme had been reversed . 
As it was , their failure to make the first two items work as play , was irritating , and caused one to undervalue even those pieces of acting which obviously had merit , such as those of Miss Jocelyn Carney in Act 1 of The Chalk Garden and of all three players in A Phoenix Too Frequent , Miss Amanda Reeves , Miss Sonia Hughes , and Mr. Aart van Bergen . 
The cast of the third piece , The Dark Lady of the Sonnets , did not reach a noticeably higher standard than that of Mr. Christopher Fry 's play , yet the former , consisting of Mr. Gerald Curtis ( Shakespeare ) , Miss Gabrielle Griffin ( Queen Elizabeth 1 ) , Miss Hazel Prance and Mr. Gilbert Sutherland , seemed to have no trouble in persuading us to take Shaw 's 50-year-old plea for a National Theatre in excellent part . 
The movement at the beginning when the Tudor Beefeater made the same damning criticism of Shakespeare 's play that people were still making of Shaw 's plays in 1910 was such a delight that we were prepared from then onwards to be satisfied with everything . 
But to accept so much help from Shaw and themselves to give so little help to their other two authors , Miss Enid Bagnold and Mr. Fry , looked like weakness in this student company . 
Zurich Sees Two Contrasting Versions of Dostoevsky 's Crime and Punishment FROM OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT 
Two stage versions of Raskolnikoff have been presented here in Zurich during the June Festival . 
Leopold Ahlsen 's play was brought to the Schauspielhaus in the production of the Berlin Schlosspark-theater and Heinrich Sutermeister 's opera is in the season 's repertory of the Stadtheater . 
Seen here on consecutive days these two adaptations of Dostoevsky 's novel seem as different from each other — and in many ways from the book itself — as current opinions on crime and punishment are sometimes at variance . 
Mr. Ahlsen 's play might well have been given the alternative title of " Crime and Detection " , and derives much of its dramatic impetus from being a good thriller . 
But it goes deeper than that , too . 
It is a fascinating psychological study and draws some attention to the political , metaphysical , religious , and moral aspects of the subject under discussion , namely , the taking of human life . 
the thursday critics KENNETH ALLSOP THE NEW BOOKS BEHAN BESTOWS AN ACCOLADE ON DELANEY She 's the flower in a cultural desert , he says 
IT is mid-morning on a Dublin Sunday . 
The streets are tranquilly sunny and still , for the town is at Mass . 
Most of it . 
In the front room of a house in Anglesey-road is a congregation who never actually got to church , but who are gathered with devotion around Brendan Behan and a brandy bottle . 
Where the bhoys are . 
In the hallway are the empties ; through the door hearts are full , hopes are high . 
There are still a few amber inches in the bottle . 
Present are some hard-core Friends of Brendan . 
They listen with many an obliging guffaw to the brandy owner 's solo swish on his anecdotal roller-coaster , with occasional stops for an old I.R.A . 
air or a Connemara tear-jerker . 
Pluckily 
ALSO present is a London journalist who arrived two hours earlier by appointment to talk to the author of Borstal Boy and The Hostage about his new work , if any , and who is now being pluckily convivial to fight off the frustration . 
The telephone has rung a couple of times , calls from other chums sniffing the wind and offering to drop by for a chat . 
At last Brendan — to the journalist 's relief — turns his attention to the writing scene . 
He proceeds to place himself in the literary hierarchy . 
" I consider myself , " he says , " a cut above Evelyn Waugh socially , a cut above Nancy Mitford artistically , a cut above Frank Haxell conversationally . 
" But , " he continues , " the greatest is Shelagh Delaney . 
Just because A Taste of Honey was set in Salford they put on her the limiting label of working-class writer . 
That 's as bloody silly as calling a Rolls-Royce a type of transport . 
She 's the flower in a cultural desert . 
" Now , me — I 'm a journalist , I write to entertain rather than educate . 
And I do n't write at all unless I 'm exceedingly skint . 
" But I 'll say this . 
I 'd like to live in America and do some writing there . 
It 's a very free place to write in , and there 's the advantage that no one knows what you 're writing about anyway . 
" Not that I did much when I was over this past two times , not with that great little Irish bar on Seventh Avenue , The Pigsty , always open . 
I was there , in even faster orbit , when that third astronaut went up — what 's his name ? 
I 'm the only man on earth who does n't know what his name is . 
Do n't tell me . 
I want to preserve that distinction . 
" I already know about Shepard and that Salvation Army chap Gagarin — the two biggest bores since Cardinal Newman . 
That 's enough of all that hooey . " 
Gravely 
HE plunges on into reminiscences of his trips . 
There is much to recall . 
Among other incidents he was banned from New York 's St. Patrick 's Day parade as a " disorderly person . " 
He was in a fight after telling a Canadian , during a chat about space-flight : "Ireland will put a shillelagh into orbit , Israel will put a matzo ball into orbit , and Lichtenstein will put a postage stamp into orbit before you Canadians put up a mouse . " 
And he suffered an alcoholic seizure and was gravely ill in hospital with a diabetic and heart condition . 
His return to Dublin was heralded by the announcement that he was " off the gargle — a retired alcoholic . " 
Since then he has been heard of often in the newspapers — three times up before the beaks for drunk and disorderly conduct . 
Partially 
LESS has been heard of Brendan 's work . 
It is now five years since his first play , The Quare Fellow , was produced , three years since Borstal Boy was published and The Hostage was put on . 
What has happened to the play , Richard 's Cork Leg , begun 18 months ago and due for presentation at the Theatre Royal , Stratford , last spring ? 
It was never finished . 
What happened to the new book partially tape-recorded by his publishers in March of last year ? 
Still a skeleton . 
Yet I have before me now a 12,000-word manuscript of a book planned to be called Confessions of an Irish Rebel which was delivered to his agents in June . 
Zestfully 
IT begins : " There was a party to celebrate Deirdre 's return from her abortion in Bristol . " 
It is ribald , funny , brilliantly observant of character , and authentic as a glass of draught porter . 
But will we see its end ? 
The last scene of this fragment is in a pub where the author throws a £10 note on to the bar and orders a round for the pals , one of whom cries : " Now are n't you the great sport , though , Brendan Behan ! " 
It is apparently praise that is still so important to him that he lets his talent drown — for not very deep under the histrionics of having a zest for life must be a great fear of living . 
BOOKS IN BRIEF 
STEPHEN MORRIS , by Nevil Shute ( Heinemann , 16s . ) . 
This first attempt at novel writing — two unpublished stories from the '20s — is the last work we shall see of the late Nevil Shute . 
It will interest devotees , but , despite the accurate flying-lore and natural story-telling skill , it is a creaky piece of apprenticeship . 
L. S. LOWRY ( Studio books , 21s . ) . 
The Painters of Today series issues this attractive collection of the work of perhaps the most fascinating artist in Britain today — the Lancastrian who does those vivid crowded dream pictures of the industrial scene . 
There is a warm and illuminating monograph by Mervyn Levy . 
PULL MY DAISY ( Evergreen Books , 10s. 6d . ) . 
Jack Kerouac 's ad-libbed text for the beat film made in a Bowery flat by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie , with stills of the strolling players , including Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso . 
It reads like a demented kind of litany — the American free-livers doing what comes naturally , and with the beat between their teeth . 
EVE PERRICK THE NEW FILMS La Lollo and the hockey girl bully-off 
I AM happy to report that I saw something this week I have never before witnessed , either in pictures or outside — a budgerigar playing a drunk scene , and playing it with perfect timing and technique . 
It gives one loud , clear hiccup and falls flat on its back . 
This brilliant budge , I may add , gets no credit in the cast list of Come September ( Odeon , Leicester-square ) , which suggests that it is either using a stand-in for the stunt stuff or needs a more pushful personal manager . 
The performance of our talented feathered friend is not the only good thing ( although the one original touch ) in the film , which is better-than-average glossy comedy , Hollywood-styled , European set . 
Most of it has been shot in and around the sun-terrace of the Hotel Splendido ( renamed the Dolce Vista for the picture ) in Portofino — and if there 's a better view to be had from a more comfortable vantage point anywhere , I 'd like to see it . 
NIGHTIES 
It also parades Gina Lollobrigida in a selection of neglige2e-and-nightie ensembles not too well designed for sleeping in , and Rock Hudson at the wheel of a shining silver Rolls-Royce . 
Mr. Hudson is an American millionaire who spends each September in his Italian villa and the company of Signorina Lollobrigida . 
In the holiday seasonal months before and after this annual idyll his major-domo ( Walter Slezak at his most nauseating ) turns the palazzo into a luxury hotel . 
Inevitably there comes the time when Mr. Hudson suddenly breaks with tradition and arrives there in July , when , just as inevitably , the place is full of American teenagers on an escorted tour . 
Result : Mr. Hudson and lady love Lollo find themselves playing chaperon ( Brenda de Banzie , the official one , has broken a leg ) to the girls , who have just been joined by a Jeep-load of boys . 
It 's hereabouts that the budge takes to the bottle , but I do n't think it was through boredom . 
The film is funny enough in places and has a line or two of painful home truths thrown in . 
GOODIES 
" I do n't want to talk like an adult , " screams Gina , walking out on the man who has so far failed to make an honest woman of her . 
" That 's how I got into all this trouble . " 
"He 's got to be 35 , " says Bobby Darin , the chief spokesman of the jeans-and-Jeep brigadiers as they 're scheming to get rid of old man , solid Rock . 
" How many hills can he take ? " 
Of course Mr. Hudson can take one more hill than the youngsters . 
So all ends as you know it will , with the middle-aged romancers respectably wed and Master Darin going steady with the delectable Sandra Dee ( to whom , I believe , he is married in real life ) . 
Miss Dee , incidentally , who keeps turning up as the typical teenager in all the " good girl " parts ( Tuesday Weld gets the " bad girl " ones ) , is becoming quite an accomplished actress . 
STUDIES 
THE Marriage-Go-Round ( Carlton ) is also a comedy of manners , but fun-films toting an X certificate have to keep a sharp look-out that the jokes about sex ( what else would they joke about with an X ? ) are of the witty , verbal variety and not the visual slapstick . 
This has only one gag — that of the entry of a gladiator ( female , 7ft. high , "stacked " and Scandinavian ) into the cosy but unbelievably elegant household of a pair of married college professors . 
The girl is a knock-out ( see picture of Julie Newmar for confirmation ) . 
She also has quite a mission in mind . 
She , " younger , prettier , stronger , and more intelligent " than the wife ( as she soon tells her ) , wants to have the perfect baby . 
And she has chosen the husband ( James Mason ) , who is an academic friend of her Nobel prize-winning father to be Big Daddy . 
This sort of situation calls for some subtle , slightly sardonic handling . 
It does n't get it . 
But The Marriage-Go-Round is not entirely a waste of time . 
I learned from it that in the Institutes of Advanced Studies attached to some American universities the subject Social Psychology used to be called Home-making and is now known as Domestic Relations . 
Susan Hayward plays the wife sharply and sweetly . 
Mason is always good for a glower . 
And Miss Newmar is a stunner in every sense of the word . 
According to the script she was once captain of the junior hockey team at her school . 
So help me so was I. ESSAYS 
{ IL GRIDO ( The Cry ) — Paris Pullman — is an earlier essay in atmospheric meandering by the { L'Avventura man , Michelangelo Antonioni . 
In it Steve Cochran , deserted by Alida Valli , roams the Pontine Marshes , alternately enjoying the hospitality of three lonely , sex-starved women , before returning home . 
Whereupon he climbs to the top of the tower in the sugar-beet refinery , suffers an unexplained attack of vertigo and falls to his death . 
Maybe this is a masterpiece , too . 
I just would n't know . 
the thursday critics KENNETH ALLSOP Did the electric chair fully avenge this baby 's murder ? 
Now new doubts are raised about the most notorious kidnapping of the century 
ON a March evening in 1932 in the New Jersey family household the nursemaid tiptoed into the baby 's room to see that 20-month-old Charles Jun. was sleeping . 
Bending over the cot , she suddenly realised that there was no sound of breathing . 
She thrust out her hand — and felt emptiness . 
NATIONAL AGONY 
A FEW minutes later the father gripping a loaded rifle , told his wife : "Anne , they have stolen our baby . " 
It was not only their baby — it was America 's . 
The grief of the young parents became a national agony that erupted into hysteria when nine weeks later the child of Charles Lindbergh , hero aviator and golden boy , was found murdered . 
Kidnap , by George Waller ( out today , Hamish Hamilton 30s. ) , is a painstaking , meticulous account of the most notorious and publicised crime of the 30's . 
The plain , sober manner of its style all the more tellingly points up not only the horror of the case itself , which floundered on to the electrocution four years later of a German-born Bronx carpenter named Bruno Richard Hauptmann , but to the raree-show emotionalism and sensation-hunger of that era . 
TOULOUSE-LAUTREC AT THE TATE Vigour and Decay By David Sylvester An exhibition of paintings and drawings by Toulouse-Lautrec , organised by the Arts Council , opened at the Tate Gallery on Friday . 
LAUTREC 'S liking for whores and dancers and singers and acrobats as subjects was , of course , a perfectly commonplace taste among artists of his time . 
What is singular about his use of them is that no other artist , of his time or any other , has painted them so directly , intimately and pertinently . 
He does n't , on the one hand , use them as symbols , pegs for a moral or aesthetic attitude , as the young Picasso does ( to take one example among many ) ; and on the other hand , he does n't use them only for the way they look , like Degas , whose dancers are more or less interchangeable with his laundrywomen — the same breed with a different set of gestures . 
He is concerned with them as they are and also for what they are . 
The artist and his obsessions 
This ca n't be explained away by his extreme personal involvement with them . 
Artists do n't necessarily bring the deepest obsessions of their life into their art — not in a direct way . 
A poet who is drunk does n't necessarily write Odes to Bacchus . 
A painter who loves whores does n't have to paint whores in order to express in art what it is in himself that makes him love them . 
He may be able to express this better by painting duchesses or cats or velvet-curtained rooms . 
In painting whores and entertainers , Lautrec was choosing to paint those whose body is their fortune . 
His own body was his misfortune . 
He must have felt this all the more poignantly for not having been a cripple from birth , but from an age , fourteen , by which he had acquired some relish in using his body , in riding and shooting . 
He must have suffered not only from knowing what a monster he was to look at , but also from the uselessness to himself of his distorted body . 
This perhaps is what gave him a fascination with bodies that were agile , bodies that could do what was asked of them , and bodies that others wanted to use . 
At the same time , he needed to reassure himself about his own deformity with his consciousness that these bodies also would in time become , as his had , useless and hideous and unwanted , and that they would become so through the very exploitation of their desirability . 
Lautrec 's vision of his women is , I think , the outcome of some such ambivalence as this : on the one hand , celebration of their easy animal vigour and grace ; on the other , celebration of the knowledge that they too would fall into decrepitude . 
For it is not a present state of decay that Lautrec presents as a rule , but only an intimation of decay . 
Partaking of vitality 
He is n't at all Swiftian about women : he does n't , getting close , rejoice in recoiling from their enlarged pores . 
He paints them as desirable — not glamourised , but desirable as women are in the flesh . 
His women are excitingly depraved , but they are n't sick , they are anything but sick ; they convey a terrific sense of well-being . 
And they are drawn with a longing to share in that well-being , as if the painter , by transmitting to canvas the tautness and flexibility and plasticity of their limbs , were by this somehow partaking of their vitality . 
He is no moralist , then ; he does n't use art as a means of revenge . 
He is no Expressionist , inflicting ( like those Central European artists who have borrowed from his style and iconography ) upon the appearance of his whores an idea of their inner corruption , making their bodies reflect the supposed state of their souls . 
He paints them in all their ambiguity . 
He paints the presence of their beautiful vitality , the promise of their decay , the process of transition between them . 
The artist he resembles most closely in spirit is , I think , Watteau . 
Watteau , dangerously delicate in health , paints a world of pleasure in which the threat of death is as surely present as in those medieval images in which skeletons dance among the ladies of the court . 
Lautrec , misshapen and useless , paints the agile and usable bodies of women who are well aware that they are on the way to being used-up . 
The transience of youth is the common theme , and Lautrec as much as Watteau is a truly tragic artist in that he communicates not only the certainty of loss but the sense of how much there is to lose . 
The Arts Council show of paintings and drawings at the Tate is not a major exhibition . 
It consists of a selection of works from the Toulouse-Lautrec Museum at Albi , France , plus a score of things from other collections in France and England . 
The Albi contribution , helped by Mr. Jeffress 's portrait of Emile Bernard , makes the representation of the early work as strong as could be wished : it shows how his art was based on a wonderfully sure grasp of form in the round . 
There are a number of notable drawings and sketches . 
But of his finest paintings there are no more than a handful . 
AT THE GALLERIES Brave New Age of Bronze By NEVILE WALLIS 
RODIN 'S ghost will not be laid . 
It is that old master 's energy and rugged form , rather than his aspirations , which have influenced two of the three conspicuous sculptors this week : Ralph Brown ( Leicester Galleries ) and the American Jack Zajac ( Roland , Browse 's ) . 
Ralph Brown began as a social realist sculptor infusing tenderness into a gawky mother fondling a child , an infant bowling a hoop . 
His responsiveness to the earthy human being , often in turning or more lively movement , is well seen in the swing of an adolescent girl and in some fine figure drawings . 
But recently his sculptural conceptions , carried out in { ciment fondu for bronze , have become more complex . 
His search now is for a metaphor for the human figure . 
Preserving the human attributes in out-thrust scrawny limbs and references to the ribbed torso , his images also resemble the growth of trees . 
Thus his forms have become bunched , with knobbly casing and clefts hard to read anatomically , and with lean stumpy extremities . 
THIS WORKS well in the more fluid forms of his swimmers where the whole emphasis is on their gliding motion or contortions . 
It does n't work , I think , in the arbitrary protrusions of the trunks of his humanistic standing figures . 
Henry Moore 's stylisation is entirely consistent when one recognises that the twist of a worn ridged pebble has suggested the bony structure of a figure as timeless . 
Brown 's distortions , on the other hand , seem superimposed on the anatomical structure of his statue of a man with a child on his shoulders , whose first impression of brute strength yields to a sense of uncertain architecture and even pretentiousness . 
The search for a synthesis , a metaphor for tough masculinity , continues . 
Brown is happiest here in recent reliefs as sensitive as the shapes of his swimmers surfacing . 
Whereas Brown gropes ambitiously and often clumsily , Jack Zajac seems perfectly assured . 
This young sculptor from Ohio has worked in Rome , and the exuberant baroque of his prancing hybrid figures is as clearly Italianate as his rugged porters are Rodinesque . 
Italy has moulded the elegance of his bronze forms , elegantly mannered even when the theme is as violent as a sacrificial goat trapped by a stake . 
The volumes and agitated silhouettes in this Easter Goat series are always expressive . 
The drama of imminent death reaches its climax in the cruciform design of the beast with rearing neck and spreadeagled legs against the long goad . 
One admires the inventive interplay of hard , tusky forms and vulnerable belly without being in the least moved by the torture . 
Aplomb is a cooling quality . 
MORE mature than either , with a certainty of architectonic design still denied to Brown , F. E. McWilliam held me longest with his recent bronzes sparely arranged at Waddington 's galleries . 
I was quite unsympathetic to his earlier surrealist figures , dismembered and reassembled , their capriciousness masking for me the reflectiveness of his mind . 
From these carvings he moved on to metal totem figures , two of these aloof , highly wrought effigies standing here as a reminder of them . 
His more recent shield-like emblems or icons yield their dark spell without the demonstrativeness of Paolozzi 's encrusted objects . 
They are deliberately frontal in aspect . 
Their intricately textured and symbolic relief sometimes appears positive on the front , negative on the back surface . 
The mood is equivocal , more capricious in small variations of cult objects , contemplative in his large bronzes . 
McWilliam may be unconscious of the distinction , for his appeal is to different levels of consciousness . 
A trinity of figures communes in the hollow of a great saucer . 
A beacon seen on the shore becomes transfigured into an ominous signal-cum-lookout post . 
A Corinthian helmet inspires an exploration of hollow form , with the inscrutable menace of the visor still preserved . 
His personality is impressed on every delphic image . 
How it is that Celtic mystery and individual beauty can coalesce in a flaky , metal shield on prongs is hard to say in simple terms . 
It is simplest to say that McWilliam 's restless fancy has found fulfilment in his most satisfying sculptures to date . 
The Supremacy of Personality THE CHARACTERS OF LOVE . 
By John Bayley . 
( Constable . 
21s . ) 
By PHILIP TOYNBEE 
THE ambiguous title reveals , by the end of this book , a depth of meaning . 
" Love , " writes Mr. Bayley , " is the potentiality of men and women which keeps them most interested in each other . " 
And later , writing of his reasons for choosing "Troilus and Criseyde , " " Othello " and " The Golden Bowl " to illustrate his thesis , he has this to say : - " 
Their achievement becomes more impressive and their status more clear if we realise how decisive in all of them is the idea of a conflict of sympathies , the kind of conflict which can only be set up by an opposition of characters of the old kind . " 
In a sense the theme of love is secondary to Mr. Bayley 's main purpose , which is to vindicate his faith in " the supremacy of personality in the greatest literature . " 
It is a theme , of course , which is extremely familiar . 
Countless old Dickensian hacks have been bemoaning Pickwick and Micawber ever since novelists and critics first began their resolute march in a different direction . 
But the point about Mr. Bayley 's book , which makes it , I believe , a critical work of the first importance , is that he is a man of great intelligence and deep reading who is very well aware of all the arguments which have been used against his position . 
He is , in the literal sense , a reactionary ; and he is reacting with passion and intellect against some of the principal assumptions of modern criticism and modern fictional practice . 
IT IS impossible to summarise the long chapters in which Mr. Bayley has investigated the chosen illustrations of his theme . 
I shall allow him , where possible , to speak for himself . 
Of Chaucer 's poem and its origins he has this to say : - " 
All these [ qualities in Boccaccio ] Chaucer modifies in some way , throwing round them a haze of the atypical and the individual . 
Whereas everything in Boccaccio is hard , elegant and general , in Chaucer it is muted , peculiar , full of objects that are unexpected and yet oddly characteristic . " 
"Othello , " for Mr. Bayley , " has a subtle and singular function , unique among Shakespeare 's plays , and in its peculiar blend of effect reminds us ... of the novel . " 
And against the many hostile critics of the play he suggests that they have adopted the false premise of supposing " that the great play should be impersonal , that the quirks and undercurrents of individual psychology should be swallowed up in a grand tragic generality . " 
As for " The Golden Bowl , " among many other personalising qualities which he finds in it , Mr. Bayley praises the novel because : - " 
Not only are the details of personal appearance and of town and country landscape selected with a vividness and subtlety unmatched in the James canon , but the physical nature of life is recorded with unique emphasis . " 
BOOK REVIEWS Raglan 's Sorry Role in the Crimea THE DESTRUCTION OF LORD RAGLAN : A Tragedy of the Crimean War . 
By Christopher Hibbert . 
( Longmans. 30s . ) 
By RAYMOND MORTIMER 
THERE never was a Crimean War : the whole story must be the invention of some satirist frantic with hatred for warfare and aristocracy . 
So at least I felt more strongly than ever when reading the book under review . 
Not that Mr. Hibbert denounces our Government for feebly drifting into so unnecessary a war : his account of its origins is restricted to three colourless pages , for he writes as a military historian concerned only with the conduct of the campaign . 
The picture that emerges is often , however , too horrid to seem credible . 
To vindicate Lord Raglan , the Commander-in-Chief , is his purpose — as it was Kinglake 's ; but Kinglake was animated also with hatred of Napoleon 3 , with whose mistress he had been in love ; and Mr. Hibbert is not biased by frustrated desire . 
His book seems to me far the most trustworthy account yet written of the Crimean campaign . 
It is based upon vast research into unpublished material , including not only the Raglan papers but hundreds of letters from obscure fighting men . 
He quotes also from Russian books that have not been translated . 
Cowardly Government 
THE battles are described in great detail and illustrated with the usual plans — rectangles showing troop-positions among vermiculated hills . 
Readers who share my distrust of such tactical exegesis must not skip the superb account of Inkerman with its hand-to-hand tussles in the fog . 
Unfortunately the author throws little light upon the military departments at home , which with their archaic incompetence and divided responsibilities were chiefly to blame for the suffering of the troops . 
Otherwise he has been admirably thorough ; and the writing is lucid , correct and lively . 
Our exceptionally pacific Government declared war only because it had not the courage to resist the jingoism of the public and the newspapers . 
The pretext was an invasion of what is now Rumania by Russian troops , who were quickly expelled by the Turks with no help from us . 
However , having sent an army as far as Turkey , we felt something or other must be done with it , and the Crimean port of Sebastopol seemed easy to capture . 
After over a year of fighting captured it was , but with no lasting advantage to us or our allies . 
The jaunt cost the lives of over half a million men . 
Experienced Generals from our Indian Army were available , but they did not belong to the nobility : and so the commands were given to men who had seen active service , if at all , not less than thirty-nine years previously . 
Two of them suffered from feeble eyesight ; one refused to wear spectacles . 
An officer could bring unlimited luggage , his wife , his French cook , and a yacht to live in ; there were not even tents for the men , and what little equipment they were given was for the most part shoddy , boots that fell to pieces , swords so soft that they would bend instead of cutting . 
Rotting Cargoes 
THOUGH we boasted far the largest navy and mercantile marine in the world , these could not bring enough supplies for our expeditionary force ; and cargoes moreover were allowed to rot unloaded . 
The two admirals were at odds with one another . 
The commissioners in charge of supplies , when asked for a few nails , refused to issue less than a ton . 
Half-starved and unprotected against the Russian winter , our troops died in their thousands : lack of fodder killed the horses and mules ; there was no other transport . 
The C.O. of the Grenadiers would not allow a mere line regiment to fight on the flank of his beautiful Guardsmen , who were therefore compelled to retreat in disorder . 
Officers like Lord Cardigan and Lord George Paget found the war so disagreeable that they returned to England in a huff . 
Of course no such escape was possible for the men , who at first fought with staggering courage . 
Gradually those who survived grew bitter ; the reinforcements were for the most part raw recruits ; morale collapsed . 
In the final action at Sebastopol our troops refused the order to advance ; and the fortress was taken by the French , who throughout the campaign had been better equipped , better fed and better led . 
Worn out by his labours , insulted in Parliament and by the Press , no longer supported by his Queen , Raglan had died three months previously . 
A wiser man would not have accepted the command at the age of sixty-five after forty years of sitting at a desk . 
He did accept it , not from conceit but from a sense of duty . 
No one could have been more courageous , more hard-working , more fair-minded , more amiable . 
He behaved to the French with exemplary and invaluable patience . 
But then he proved equally patient with the military departments at home that were murdering his troops . 
He could not bear to say an unkind word to anyone . 
Creature of Habit 
WE can not refuse him our pity . 
He worked himself to death at a Herculean task for which he was fitted by neither character nor experience . 
We must remember at the same time that he had been for the previous twenty-eight years Secretary at the Horse Guards apparently without attempting any reform in the administration of the Army . 
He was described by Palmerston as " a creature of habit " ; and in the Crimea he found himself a victim of the grotesque system he had helped to maintain . 
The conservative who dislikes changes even when they are improvements may , like Raglan , be a good man . 
He can not be a good Commander-in-Chief . 
IRON DUKE ON PAPER WELLINGTON AT WAR . 
Letters selected and edited by Anthony Brett-James . 
( Macmillan . 
42s . ) 
By SIR ARTHUR BRYANT 
NOT even Dr. Johnson could hit a verbal nail on the head more effectively than the Duke of Wellington . 
He once said that there was nothing in life like a clear definition , and during his years of command he was incessantly engaged in defining things clearly . 
It was one of the qualities that made him so great a commander ; as with Field-Marshal Montgomery it was almost impossible to mistake his meaning , however unpalatable . 
As the human capacity for getting the wrong end of the stick , especially in the fog and confusion of war , is almost infinite , this quality is an essential part of the military art . 
If good writing be the art of conveying meaning with the greatest possible force in the fewest possible words — and I can think of no better definition — Wellington was a very good writer . 
His military correspondence , like his recorded conversation , is delightful reading . 
"IT is not very agreeable to anybody , " he reminded a complaining Portuguese magnate , " to have strangers quartered in his house ; nor is it very agreeable to us strangers , who have good houses in our own country , to be obliged to seek for quarters here . 
We are not here for our pleasure ; the situation of your country renders it necessary . " 
Could anything be neater ? 
Or anything more true than this ? 
" Half the business of the world , particularly that of our country , is done by accommodation and by the parties understanding each other . " 
Or this , quoted by Mr. Brett-James in his admirable introduction — " I do not know how Mr ..... has discovered that my channels of intelligence are of doubtful fidelity . 
I should find it very difficult to point out what channels of intelligence I have : but probably Mr ..... knows . " 
MR . 
BRETT-JAMES has done modern readers — who turn to the great classics of our past too little — a service by producing a new selection from Wellington 's letters . 
Most of them are taken from twelve volumes and two and a half million words of Colonel Gurwood 's " Dispatches of the Duke of Wellington " and from the fifteen volumes of the Duke 's "Supplementary Dispatches . " 
I will not say that no better selection could have been made ; Mr. Brett-James 's book does not compare , for instance , with the much fuller selection made by Colonel Gurwood himself and published in early Victorian days in a single volume of nearly a thousand pages . 
In deference to the reading tastes of our day Mr. Brett-James 's compass is far smaller . 
The truth is that at least a dozen selections of equal size , equally good and equally representative , could have been made from the same source . 
What matters is that the editor has given us the essence of Wellington 's genius — his clarity , his good sense , his powers of observation , his understanding of human nature , his dry irony , his wonderful balance and foresight . 
It is like offering the reader a small parcel of a superb cellar ; it is all there for his buying if he wants more . 
I can not help adding one sample of Wellington 's style . 
He had been approached about the return to England of a major whose fiance2e was pining in his absence . 
" I can not say that I have ever known of a young lady dying of love . 
They contrive , in some manner , to live and look tolerably well , notwithstanding their despair and the continued absence of their lover ; and some even have been known to recover so far as to be inclined to take another lover , if the absence of the first has lasted too long . 
I do n't suppose that your prote2ge2e can ever recover so far , but I do hope that she will survive the continued necessary absence of the Major , and enjoy with him here-after many happy days . " 
ADVICE FOR A LADY IN LOVE TO A YOUNG ACTRESS : The Letters of Bernard Shaw to Molly Tompkins . 
( Constable . 
63s . ) 
By HESKETH PEARSON 
FOR sheer entertainment and humorous common sense the letters and criticisms of Bernard Shaw are unrivalled . 
Much of their scintillation and gaiety is due to his emotional detachment from life , and his peculiar genius derives from the fact that , being removed from the complicated agitations of ordinary human beings , he could observe with cool clarity the actions resulting from their temperamental disturbances . 
This oddity in his nature appears again and again in his letters to women , who fell in love with him and had to be coaxed out of their enraptured condition . 
One of them , a young actress named Molly Tompkins , arrived in England from America with her husband and small son , for the sole purpose of meeting the prophet Shaw , who sent her well over a hundred letters and post-cards between 1921 and his death . 
"IS it not delightful , to be in love ? " he wrote to her ; " it has happened to me twice . 
It does not last , because it does not belong to this earth ; and when you clasp the idol it turns out to be a rag doll like yourself ; for the immortal part must elude you if you grab at it . " 
But while he was content with dreams of fair women , they were looking for something more corporeal , which he could only supply by giving them excellent advice on how to order their lives . 
IN this handsome volume many of his letters to Molly Tompkins are reproduced in photostat . 
With a few alterations carbon copies could have been sent to any of his adoring female correspondents without surprising them . 
They contain advice on such matters as the disadvantage of an actress using make-up off the stage and the advantage of using it when interviewing managers , on the correct pronunciation of words , on how to behave as a mother and the proper way to bring up a son , on the process of buying white oxen in Italy , on the necessity in England of putting " Esq . " 
not " Mr. " on envelopes addressed to men , on how to catch a bat , and on the expediency of keeping a parrot instead of a dog : " Parrots are amusing , and never die . 
You wish they did . " 
Frequently in these letters his intuition or observation is crystallised in a phrase , e.g. , " Learning to live is like learning to skate : you begin by making a ridiculous spectacle of yourself , " and " The fear of God may be the beginning of wisdom , but the fear of Man is the beginning of murder , " and " It is useless to try to help people whom God does not mean to be helped . " 
FICTION Keeping The Beasts In Their Place By NIGEL DENNIS ANGUS WILSON , The Old Men at the Zoo . 
Secker & Warburg , 18s . 
"OUR island , it would appear , is too small to allow even for the controlled return of the wolf , the bear and the boar . " 
So says the Times — or rather , Angus Wilson makes the Times say so in his new novel , which is set in London in 1970 . 
There is no reason to doubt that his sober , careful verdict on the danger of " open " Zoos catches exactly the tone of the Times of 1970 ; but we are left worrying about Mr. Wilson himself . 
He has written the future " editorial . " 
He has written the present novel . 
Are they at odds with one another ? 
The matter is mentioned because the puzzle of Mr. Wilson 's new novel is to know clearly what he is saying and where he is standing . 
This was never a problem in Mr. Wilson 's early days . 
His first books of short stories were as clear as only crystals of poison can be , and the horrors he held up to our inspection were almost too recognisable to be faced . 
But , since then , Mr. Wilson has widened both his medium and his heart . 
He writes big novels now and expresses his griefs and pains quite openly ; he still has plenty of poison , but he doles it out with a more distressed hand — in brief , he is no longer a pure satirist . 
One may mourn the change , but one has no right to condemn it . 
An author should be allowed to change as he pleases : the only test is the quality of the result . 
The Old Men at the Zoo has much to commend it . 
It has been written with great feeling and it has some very enjoyable characters in it . 
It is also a very just book , in that the most absurd characters are allowed their virtues and dignities . 
Even when it is cross , angry and spiteful , it is still a kindly book . 
The difficulty is to know exactly how to find one 's way about in it . 
The title suggests that it is about the English masses ( who are " the Zoo " ) and those who govern them ( who are " the old men " ) . 
If this is correct , then much of Mr. Wilson 's symbolism becomes easy to follow . 
We see clearly that if the Zoo is to be decently conducted , those who govern it must do so unselfishly , intelligently and civilisedly . 
They must also realise that animals are tricky , even dangerous , beasts , and must not feel sentimental about tarantulas and lynxes . 
The chiefs of Mr. Wilson 's Zoo lack most of these qualifications . 
Some of them are idealists — in the sense that they are more obsessed with theories and dreams about animals than they are with actual , living animals . 
Others of them love only those aspects of the animal that suit their professional interests — an extreme ( and witty ) example is the Zoo pathologist , who loves animals most when they are dead , dissection being his forte . 
These persons , let us say , are the department chiefs and top bureaucrats of our society — and under them are the " keepers " and " assistant-keepers " who carry out their orders . 
But above them all are the Secretary and the Director — men of nearly equal power who frame Zoo policy and fight over what this policy should be ; these two we may call Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition . 
The clash of policy in Mr. Wilson 's novel is over the Zoo of the future . 
The Director hates Regent 's Park : he believes that animals must be given " limited liberty " and allowed to roam in Whipsnadian reserves . 
The Secretary thinks this is nonsense . 
Animals , he insists , are best off in the cosy , though somewhat cramped , cages designed for them by the great Victorian , Decimus Burton . 
All this is most prettily done . 
Mr. Wilson 's descriptions of animals are first-rate — particularly as he is most honest about them , never pretending for a moment that some of them are extremely ugly . 
And the problems these animals present are perfectly genuine ones : should " the wolf , the bear and the boar " be allowed considerable liberty , or is the Times right in concluding that they are too dangerous to enjoy such privileges ? 
This problem becomes acutely personal to every reader when a liberated wolf eats the Director 's daughter . 
Thousands of innocent animals have to pay for the wolf 's indiscretion by being shut up in Regent 's Park again . 
Is this fair ? 
Mr. Wilson does not say whether it is fair or not . 
And by the end of the book we realise that the puzzles and hypotheses which he presents are honest expressions of his own uncertainty . 
His intention is not to provide closed answers , but to proffer dozens of open questions . 
This is unusual and stimulating in theory , but tending to confusion in practice . 
Mr. Wilson 's novel , one feels , would have been remarkably good if he had stuck strictly to the Zoo . 
Instead , he has filled out his canvas of the future with a war in which England is invaded and crushed by combined European armies ( Russia and America agree not to intervene ) . 
He has put in saboteurs , and spies , and politicians , and resistance movements — and by the time he has done he has put in more matter than he can handle and made an artistic clutter of his humane worries . 
His novel is still a good one — but the careful , precise pen of the former short-story writer could have made his parable shorter , clearer and far more brilliant . 
People On The Move By ANTHONY QUINTON ALASDAIR CLAYRE , The Window , Cape , 16s . 
IVY COMPTON-BURNETT , The Mighty and their Fall , Gollancz , 16s . 
HOWARD SPRING , I Met a Lady , Collins , 21s . 
" H. D. " , Bid Me to Live , Grove Press , 25s . 
FOR topicality , Alasdair Clayre 's first novel The Window would stand out emphatically enough at any time beside this week 's other books ; in the present condition of the world it is almost too much . 
The central figures are a decent , devout , inarticulate organist in a poor district of Portsmouth , his frigid , respectable wife and their sons , Peter , a trumpet-playing factory worker , and Matthew , a pretty batman whose ambition is to be a butler . 
Also involved are the step-children of the vicarage : James , an elaborately cerebral philosopher , and Anna , a bemused , sensitive pianist . 
The organist , Matthew and James get caught up , in different ways and with fatal consequences for one of them , in the Easter March of an idealistic organisation . 
The narrative is developed with great skill and efficiency , the point of view shifting from one of the main characters to another . 
In its course Mr. Clayre conducts his readers on a convincingly authoritative tour of a wide variety of pre-eminently contemporary scenes : an assembly-line , an officers ' mess , a jazz club , a left-wing coffee-bar , a deb dance , as well as the March itself . 
It is an impressively copious image of our society , but its realism has the thinness of a cross-section . 
The Sands family are not very plausible as a group ; even the accelerated social mobility of our time could hardly accommodate a son like Peter in such a family . 
James is an Englishman 's idea of a young Frenchman , and Matthew seems to have been transferred from one of Simon Raven 's amazing regiments . 
There is a fairly sharp line between these and the characters Mr. Clayre likes , the organist and Anna for example , who are honoured with a less rigid and political treatment . 
But this is an able and intelligent book whose limitations reflect the magnitude of its ambitions . 
The Mighty and their Fall is absolutely standard Ivy Compton-Burnett , another elegant construction in moral geometry , another variation on her insulated domestic theme with its normal elements of dubious paternity , hidden wills , a despised governess , gnomic servants and Hobbesian toddlers . 
Experts could no doubt identify most of the characters and situations with those of earlier books and even the less initiated can see that this one involves no striking new departures . 
Miss Compton-Burnett 's curious instrument grates on some ears , but for those who can stand it there is more to be got from it than the incidental felicities to be discovered by brief dippings . 
Her books should be read at a sitting if possible , since the plot and characters are only revealed by the cumulative effect of the dialogue . 
The centre of this novel is the struggle between a widowed father and his eldest daughter who both resort to deceit , she to prevent his second marriage , he to prevent her inheriting his brother 's money . 
He has a more impersonal justification in his concern for the continuing welfare of the estate but it gives his response to exposure a more blatant and so more discreditable quality . 
Miss Compton-Burnett 's vertiginous economies both of technique and material have a charm of their own and there is a fascination in what she manages to do with what is left ; but they also reflect , as much as Racine 's , a judgment of importance , of what really matters in the relations of human beings . 
Howard Spring 's I Met a Lady is , predictably and honourably , a thoroughly good read — the whole quarter of a million words of it . 
A rambling , loose-jointed affair , it seems to be the result of throwing a few human types together at random to see what would come out . 
The hero escapes from Manchester and cotton with an inheritance that allows him to indulge his pronounced negative capability as a writer of little essays . 
After a good deal of dithering he marries a nice rich actress and what with her connections and the family of a tycoon who unaccountably becomes his friend he has plenty to look in upon and make harmlessly facetious remarks about . 
It is a pleasant-spirited , old-fashioned book and pretends to do no more than tell an only mildly engrossing story . 
" H. D. " 's Bid Me to Live , a small , handsomely-produced volume , is described as " a madrigal of war-time love and death in the London of 1917 . " 
It recounts in short , hectic and often verbless sentences the inner life of Julia Ashton , a sensitive American married to Rafe , who spends his leaves in the bed of the girl upstairs . 
Julia wrongly thinks that Frederick , a red-bearded author of " scandalous , volcanic novels " married to an ample German aristocrat , is in love with her . 
The clef of this roman is ready to hand , and it bears the imprint not , as the blurb says , of major literature , but of a major litte2rateur . 
In its undisciplined artiness it is of a piece with the odd , vanished world it obliquely describes . 
IN BRIEF By FELICIA LAMB By The Danube 
Family Jewels BY PETRU DUMITRIU , Collins , 21s . 
First part of mighty trilogy about peasants revolting against landed gentry in late 19th- and early 20th-century Rumania . 
Formidable amassing of detail gives interesting picture of Bucharest and Danube plain life . 
All gentry characters unpleasant , all peasant ones unattractive , but the whole enjoyable once difficult beginning surmounted . 
A Man on the Roof BY KATHLEEN SULLY , Peter Davies , 15s . 
Two sprightly elderly ladies try to escape ghost of husband of one of them and recapture youth and freedom in their flight . 
Charming fantasy told with perfect light touch . 
Delightful surprise ending . 
The Silent Speaker BY NOEL STREATFEILD , Collins , 16s . 
Neatly-constructed whydunit . 
Members of unexpected suicide 's last carefree dinner party all dig into her apparently blameless past . 
Skilful maintenance of suspense right up to not-too-unlikely solution . 
Modern rich Londoners well observed . 
Every Night and All BY WILLIAM MILLER , Blond , 16s . 
Young Glaswegian on the run from his native slums finds London can mean luxury — at an unpleasant price . 
Convincing Glasgow beginning tails off into forced , happy , socialistic ending , excusable from 27-year-old author . 
Bad characters good , good characters bad . 
Children in Love BY MOIRA VERSCHOYLE , Hodder , 15s . 
Glamorous worldly-wise 17-year-old disrupts backwoods Anglo-Irish family and turns perfect boy-and-girl friendship into unhappy adolescent triangle . 
Tragic ending to a golden summer in well-evoked Irish Far West . 
Perfect companion to a box of chocolates . 
The Slap BY MARION FRIEDMANN , Longmans , 15s . 
Grim exploration situation in small South African country town . 
THE WORLD OF MUSIC A Drastic Way with Verdi By DESMOND SHAWE-TAYLOR 
THE score of " Falstaff " seems to have ripened against a warm orchard wall . 
It is all juice and goodness , firm flesh and sweet tang : at once earthy and heavenly , mellow and zestful , old and young . 
This is one of music 's miracles ; and the miracle was achieved by Boito 's cunning and Verdi 's genius upon the basis of an effective but prosaic Shakespearean farce . 
Franco Zeffirelli 's new production , unveiled at Covent Garden last Wednesday , was eagerly awaited after his romantic " Lucia " and his wonderfully brilliant " Cav " and " Pag " at the same house — not to mention his more controversial " Romeo and Juliet " at the Old Vic . 
His " Falstaff , " though likely to prove a hit , is again controversial . 
Visually , it is inventive and often lovely . 
Dramatically , it is a hotchpotch : imaginative , eccentric , frequently crude . 
THE worst comes near the beginning . 
If you can accept the short opening scene between Falstaff and his followers , the evening has no further terrors for you . 
The style here is that of the Crazy Gang , though without their sublime impudence ; for if Messrs. Naughton and Gold had played Pistol and Bardolph , they would at least have stormed the Royal Box and tried on a tiara . 
Michael Langdon and Robert Bowman could only rampage and roister around the stage , though " only " is a poor word , for they achieved a good deal . 
For instance , Geraint Evans 's admirable delivery of the Honour tirade was effectively diminished when to each one of Falstaff 's rhetorical questions Bardolph , from beneath a table or halfway up the stairs , insisted on nodding a tireless and zany affirmative . 
Thence to Ford 's garden , a sort of inn courtyard : striking . 
Enter two letter-carrying Wives ( Mariella Angioletti and Josephine Veasey ) , a Dutch-doll Nannetta ( Mirella Freni ) and ... but who is this , sweeping in , last and grandest , like a beruffed Lady Bracknell , with parasol at the slope and lorgnettes at the ready ? 
Can it be our old friend Mrs. Quickly , servant to Dr. Caius and Eastcheap hostess ? 
Of course , she runs the entire show ; the only surprise is that she did n't get a letter too . 
If so wild a misinterpretation can be tolerated , she is capitally sung and played by the exuberant Regina Resnik . 
That Mrs. Ford hardly got a look in was to some extent the fault of Signora Angioletti , who on the first night continually allowed her phrases to vanish in mid-utterance as though the current had been cut off . 
The explanation can hardly be a failure of voice , for a few bars later all was well again ; I fear it must have been Art . 
IN the second act things began to improve , although Mrs. Quickly 's famous deep curtseys on the word " Reverenza ! " were turned into nonsense by having to be executed on a staircase . 
Best of all was the great scene between Ford and Falstaff , where no misplaced ingenuity was allowed to impair our pleasure in the excellent singing of John Shaw and Mr. Evans and in the brilliant and zestful playing of the orchestra under Signor Giulini . 
The orchestra was throughout in splendid form ; particularly at the quiet end of Act 3 , Scene 1 , where the empty stage and darkening sky , the calling of the distant voices , the magical chain of descending harmonies and the slowly closing curtains were combined by producer and conductor into an exquisite theatrical unity . 
The tapestried interior of Ford 's house made a delightful spectacle , and the final scene opened in a vein of high romance , with pale shafts of moonlight striking across the forest glade ; but on the arrival of the fairies Herne 's Oak split asunder and soared aloft , never to be seen again . 
We found ourselves back in the inn courtyard — but a courtyard transformed into such a dream-pageant as might have been conjured up by a Chagall given unlimited funds to stage a party for Mr. Bestegui or Mr. Onassis . 
Somewhere in the course of all this — the clowning and the prettiness , the slapstick and whimsy and phantasmagoria — Verdi 's simplicity and honesty have fallen by the wayside . 
But the compensations are great , especially on the musical side — and I fear it is the kind of showy production that makes such a phrase seem natural . 
Great pleasure is given by Luigi Alva and Signora Freni as the young lovers . 
Signor Giulini excels in the purely lyrical music , and the details are always handled with loving care ; where breadth and robustness are demanded he is sometimes less happy . 
Mr. Evans continues to ripen and improve his distinguished Falstaff , but we can not expect to see this impersonation at its best until it figures within a less confusing framework . 
THE Welsh National Opera Company began an enterprising week of opera at Sadler 's Wells with two much earlier Verdi operas : the " Nabucco " of 1842 and " { La Battaglia di Legnano " of 1849 . 
Both were accompanied by the Bournemouth Orchestra and conducted by Charles Groves with no very marked feeling for the appropriate style . 
" Nabucco " was in all essentials the production that has been seen in London twice before , but it is now distinguished by a new Abigail ( Elizabeth Vaughan ) who tackled her very difficult music with remarkable aplomb and accuracy , if she can enrich her timbre she might go far . 
Both operas are full of stirring choral scenes , sung vigorously but with a faulty sense of legato by the Welsh choir . 
Drastic treatment was again meted out to Verdi in " { La Battaglia di Legnano , " which lost all connection with what the Press statement called " a rather dated incident in the 12th century " and was lugged forward into modern times by John Moody , to become an episode of the Italian Resistance during the German occupation . 
Modern diction and ways of thought were , however , not consistently adopted . 
In one of Verdi 's furious cabalettas ( husband discovering wife 's supposed infidelity ) " { Trema ! trema ! coppia esecrata ! " became " Damn you ! damn you ! pair of dirty liars ! " ; but when the wife popped a compromising letter into her " bosom " ( standard post-box for operatic missives ) , it instantly " stung her like a serpent . " 
Notwithstanding such quaint distractions , the power and the beauty of Verdi 's invention in the last two acts could be perceived . 
The best singing came from Heather Harper . 
The Welsh Opera continues to deserve our gratitude , but could learn much in the way of vocal style from a surprisingly vocal performance of Rossini 's " Otello " by the Philopera Circle at St. Pancras on Friday , about which I hope to add a word or two next week . 
WELSH NIGHT 
Between them , Cardiff and St. Pancras ensure that not a note written by Verdi remains unheard in London . 
Meanwhile , thanks to the Welsh National Opera Company for bringing , if only for a single May night , another Rimsky-Korsakov opera to Sadler 's Wells , a theatre which knew " Snow Maiden " and " Tsar Saltan " in pre-war days . 
" May Night , " a folksy precursor of the more sophisticated orientalisms of " Sadko " and " The Golden Cockerel , " proved a happy choice , with the pleasing voices of John Wakefield ( Levko ) , Iona Jones ( Anna ) and Heather Harper ( Queen of the Roussalki ) well-suited to its melodic grace . 
The male topers , too , Harold Blackburn , Laurie Payne and Stephen Manton , entered into the spirit of the piece , but not Phyllis Ash Child 's completely un-shrewish Sister-in-law . 
Sally Hulke 's sets and John Moody 's production , like the chorus , provided more acceptable contributions than the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra , whose neat rhythmic response to Charles Makerras 's conducting was too often wide of the mark in pitch . 
Boito 's " Mefistofele " remains the Company 's most imaginative production . 
Triumphing ingeniously over space , it depicts Heaven and a Witches ' Sabbath as successfully as Faust 's study . 
Raimund Herinex has , again , the right voice and manner for the Prince of Evil , but rejuvenation brings Tano Ferendino 's Faust no increased vocal confidence . 
Under Warwick Braithwaite the orchestra recovered pitch , while sagging intonation crossed the footlights , weighing heavier on the angelic chorus of the Prologue than their golden wings . 
F. A. BALLET By RICHARD BUCKLE What Every Guru Knows 
ON Wednesday night , when my pampered colleagues were borne in their capacious palanquins either to — Zeffirelli 's ( Verdi 's [ Shakespeare 's ] ) — " Falstaff " or to see those onychophorous ootocoids at the Fortune , this Cinderella among critics made his way alone and on foot to watch Indian dancing at La Scala in Charlotte Street . 
NOW , though I would not go as far as to agree with the programme that the technique of Kamala , the eldest of the three sisters performing , " is in the enveable position of being above controversy , " she has learnt some of Bharata Natya and she gets by . 
Radha and Vasanti are graceful , too . 
It is how their brother Mr. Kumar got on stage that beats me — unless , of course , he is really Peter Sellers . 
From his performance , I guessed that , watching his kid sisters perfecting themselves in their art , he suddenly could n't bear not to be in on it too , and finally forbade them to appear without him . 
There can be no doubt that , like Romeo Coates , he believes utterly in his mission . 
" Dance inspires him ceaselessly to strive higher and higher towards the shining pinnacle of perfection that is the goal of every Artiste . " 
Kathak , with its swift spins , is what bedizened boys used to dance before Mogul Emperors . 
Mr. Kumar rashly did it stripped to the waist , his long hair arranged in an untidy bird's-nest . 
He never got up much speed , and made few turns . 
What he did do was to fix us with a basilisk stare , make odd pointing gestures and keep improvising for about twenty minutes . 
A polite attempt to drive him offstage with a burst of applause only spurred him to go on and on . 
Eventually his attention wandered from his work , and his eye hit on a ground mike near the footlights . 
He had a bright idea . 
He stopped dancing , pulled the mike upstage and , indicating his anklets of bells , told us " Now I will make you hear one bell — just one bell , not four hundred . " 
Starting with the full carillon ( if someone had not turned off the mike we should have been deafened ) he went into a shuddering Antonio-type diminuendo . 
Even so I heard not one bell , but at least six . 
Then he started dancing again . 
THE able drummer , the flautist who was " a worthy disciple to the great living Flute Wizard Sri T. R. Mahalingam , " Mali to his innumerable fans " , " and the nice lady singer who let it be known that she was " married to Mr. Narian who was a dancing partner to the Veteran Dancer Mr. Ramgopal " seemed embarrassed . 
And I exchanged looks with a neighbour who happened to be a one-year-old ( yes ) Indian boy in a white fur coat . 
RECORDS Hands and Feet By FELIX APRAHAMIAN 
RECORDING companies no longer neglect the King of Instruments , and the recent spate of organ records reflects the younger and more discriminating organ fanciers ' demands for authenticity of timbre and interpretation . 
The fascination as well as the bugbear of the organ is that no two are alike in specification or sound , so that discs of organ music played on the very instrument for which it was conceived deserve an especial welcome . 
Some , of course , remain curiosities rather than performances : Widor was an octogenarian when he recorded his toccata , the organist 's warhorse , at Saint-Sulpice . 
Now , his pupil and successor , Marcel Dupre2 , himself in his seventies and a pioneer of organ records , has re-recorded it there in a coupling with Widor 's fifth and " Gothic " symphonies which shows how well his master " scored " for his beloved Cavaille2-Coll instrument . 
( Westminster — mono only . ) 
MERCURY issue five discs of Dupre2 at Saint-Sulpice , of which two are of particular interest , Vol. 2 consisting entirely of his own music , and Vol. 5 which also includes " { Les bergers , " by his one-time pupil Olivier Messaien . 
Noisy surfaces , but the right kind of noise behind them . 
Another Dupre2 pupil , the Belgian Flor Peeters , has recorded some pre-Bach organ music from North Germany and the Netherlands on the Schnitger rebuild at St. Michael 's , Zwolle . 
Clearer music and a clearer sound . 
A splendid record . 
( HMV — mono . ) 
THAT NOVEL BY THE TUTOR IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY RAISES AN INTRIGUING QUESTION Why has this face appeared among the best-sellers ? 
The BOOK PAGE — by ROBERT PITMAN 
PERHAPS you recognise that heavy and somewhat sullen face on the left . 
If you are fond of being in the fashion you certainly ought to . 
For weeks now those thick-lidded and decidedly untwinkling eyes have stared out at the readers of a succession of heavy literary magazines and review pages . 
For weeks the owner of the face has had her name at the top of the list of best-selling novelists . 
She is Miss Iris Murdoch , tutor in moral philosophy at St. Anne 's College , Oxford ; wife of Mr. John Bayley , a fellow don ; and author of A SEVERED HEAD , which was published in June amid a loud cooing of intellectual approval . 
Miss Murdoch is the author of several books . 
Yet suddenly , with her fifth novel , she has been sifted out by the priests of culture for their own honours list . 
Her name has acquired an almost visible halo . 
For those who wish to impress , it can now be plopped confidently into a conversation like French seasoning upon a salad . 
Soon those who can not quite afford Scandinavian cutlery or furniture from Heals will have the latest Iris Murdoch in their sitting-rooms instead . 
And soon , no doubt , an interviewer from the B.B.C. programme " Monitor " will be leading TV cameras around Miss Murdoch 's house at Steeple Aston outside Oxford with the awed , hushed tread appropriate to a cathedral . 
DEGENERATE 
Yet , despite all this attention , no one has mentioned the really outstanding characteristic of Miss Murdoch 's new novel . 
It is not its style , which is often pretentious and sometimes a little lame . 
It is not its characters , which are unbelievable , nor its background , which is inaccurate and unreal . 
It is the fact that this story from the Oxford Moral Philosophy Department is , by the standards of most people , utterly degenerate . 
That is an epithet I rarely use on this page . 
Even when it is justified the best criticism is usually silence . 
There are too many booksellers , not all by any means in the back streets , who gloat over condemnation of their wares with the relish with which some film distributors greet an " X " certificate . 
Yet A Severed Head has already been given its " X " by the mandarin reviewers . 
Their coy or leering references to its plot have kept it selling well for weeks on end . 
I do not feel it out of place to offer a corrective . 
PLEASED 
A Severed Head is the story of a wine merchant named Martin Lynch-Gibbon . 
We meet him first of all watching his mistress , Georgie Hands , while ( " with a tense demure consciousness " of his gaze ) she draws on the peacock-blue stockings which Lynch-Gibbon has given her . 
Lynch-Gibbon is pleased with life . 
His wife Antonia , though a few years older than he is , is beautiful , intellectually stimulating — and knows nothing about Georgie . 
Then , piece by piece , Lynch-Gibbon 's complacency is shattered . 
Antonia falls in love with her American psychiatrist and goes to live with him . 
The psychiatrist 's ugly but mysterious half-sister , Honor Klein , also upsets Lynch-Gibbon by finding out about Georgie and telling Antonia . 
A penitent Lynch-Gibbon is severely rebuked by his wife and her psychiatrist lover for deceiving them over Georgie . 
Then Lynch-Gibbon has a fight with Honor Klein in a cellar ( " she came against me with both hands pushing and clawing , and endeavoured to drive her knee into my stomach . " ) . 
After this encounter , Lynch-Gibbon decides that he is fascinated with the rather repellent Miss Klein . 
He goes to her house in Cambridge , gets in through an open door , and finds her in bed with her psychiatrist half-brother . 
Before the book ends Georgie gives herself first to Lynch-Gibbon 's brother , Alexander , and then to the psychiatrist . 
Antonia leaves the psychiatrist for her brother-in-law Alexander . 
And Lynch-Gibbon is left with the incestuous , slightly-moustached Miss Klein . 
I should also mention that in addition to all these humourless couplings Lynch-Gibbon suffers from a homosexual liking for the psychiatrist too . 
Such is the novel which Mr. Cyril Connolly greeted as " a heaven-sent gift " and which led Mr. Alan Pryce-Jones to exclaim " She triumphs , " and Mr. Kenneth Allsop , the " Tonight " interviewer , to give as his judgment : " She has the rare universal eye of the great novelist . " 
Which , I believe you will decide , is all my rare universal eye and Betty Martin . 
SO WRONG 
True , the praise has not been unrelieved . 
Mr. Connolly himself pointed out that Miss Murdoch , having chosen a wine merchant as a hero , goes wrong over almost every detail concerning wine . 
Mr. Philip Toynbee , with some justice , wrote : " Though she does not wish us to admire any of the characters , except Honor , she does demand of us a credulity , a sympathy , and a concern which I have found quite impossible to give . " 
Mr. Peter Forster likened Miss Murdoch 's dialogue to Ethel M. Dell . 
Yet the striking thing is that none of these critics challenged Miss Murdoch 's novel on moral grounds . 
I would not ask them to denounce it as pornography . 
A Severed Head is not pornography . 
It is so stuffed with turgid and often meaningless symbolism that only an extreme masochist could drive himself to read it for the kicks . 
Nor is it propagandist as Lolita was . 
It does not enthuse over incest or homosexuality . 
It does not enthuse . 
It does worse — it merely yawns . 
It enshrines the bored and disgusted-by-nothing attitude of that shallow but influential clique which dominates the literary weeklies and the B.B.C. Brains Trust and which tries to make normal , human , shockable people feel like country cousins or like the " pi " little boys who dare to remain mute while the rest of the dormitory is giggling over dirty stories . 
The critics who praised Lolita defended the author 's moral notions . 
But there was no such defence of Miss Murdoch — the critics were so sophisticated that they saw nothing which needed defending . 
The Observer wrote : " She is serious , Leftish , and high-minded , with a sharp brain tempered by good sense : an English university seems just the right background for her . " 
But is " high " the most apt word for Miss Murdoch 's mind ? 
For this is not her only puzzling novel . 
In her often brilliantly funny second book , Flight from the Enchanter , Rosa , a sensible upper-middle-class young lady , befriends two Poles whom she meets in a factory . 
She teaches them English in their sordid room in Pimlico while their aged mother , lying on a mattress on the floor , looks on . 
Occasionally the brothers dance round the mother or prod her with their feet . 
One cries : { 3 " You old rubbish ! 
You old sack ! 
We soon kill you , we put you under floorboards , you not stink there worse than here ! " 
WATCHING 
One day Rosa goes to meet the brothers and finds only one of them , Stefan , waiting for her . 
He takes her to the room where he says : { 3 " We make love now , Rosa . 
It is time . " 
"Your mother ! " exclaims Rosa , noticing the old lady 's watching eyes . 
{ 3 " She not see , not hear , " is the reply . 
The next day Rosa finds only the other brother , Jan , waiting . 
In the room at Pimlico , Rosa asks : " You know about Stefan ? " 
Jan replies sternly : { 3 " Of course . 
And now is me . " 
Of this incident one critic has written : — 
"This whole episode is a brutal commentary on the equivocal nature of pity : the revulsion of feeling which an unequal relationship inspires . " 
It may be , of course , that the stud-farm entanglements of Miss Murdoch 's latest book are also a brutal commentary on something 's equivocal nature . 
Unfortunately , if they are , even Miss Murdoch 's most distinguished admirers seem unable to discover exactly what that something is . 
Miss Murdoch 's publishers claim that A Severed Head "is as exciting as Treasure Island . " 
In the ultra-sophisticated society in which comparisons like that can be made and in which people like Miss Murdoch are not just the rebels but the teachers , it is little wonder that the young are occasionally more interested in yellow golliwogs than in the works of old squares like R. L. Stevenson . 
DISTURBING — THIS NOVEL ABOUT A TOP TORY 
NOW for another disturbing novel . 
It is THE MINISTER ( Hamish Hamilton , 16s. ) by Maurice Edelman , the suave , culture-loving and luxuriantly good-looking M.P . 
who represents the car-workers of Coventry North . 
Mr. Edelman has himself made an intense study of British political novels . 
To literary societies he has lectured in languorous tones about John Galt , who wrote The Borough ( subject : political jobbery ) in 1832 , and about A. E. W. Mason , best-known for The Four Feathers but also the author of The Turnstile ( based on Mason 's own brief career as Liberal M.P . 
for Coventry ) . 
Now , in The Minister I believe that Edelman has produced a novel which itself deserves a very high place indeed in the roll of political fiction . 
It is certainly the novel which I have enjoyed most in 1961 . 
A reservation 
It tells how Melville , a Tory Minister , achieves the aim of every Tory Minister . 
He becomes Tory Prime Minister . 
But his public triumph is hollow since he has simultaneously discovered that his plain but well-loved wife has also allowed herself to be well loved by his own brother and perhaps by other friends as well . 
Set against this theme is the story of how Melville , having said : " I want the African to be my brother , " adds in an indiscreet whisper , " but not my brother-in-law . " 
The pretty lady at whom the indiscretion is directed is the mistress of an Opposition Leader . 
Duly circulated and printed in the Press , it stirs riots in Africa and almost wrecks Melville 's career . 
Why do I call the novel disturbing ? 
It is not because of Edelman 's approach to morals which — unlike Miss Murdoch 's — is both adult and real . 
No , the disturbing thing about The Minister is that far from being artificial , it too often rings frighteningly true . 
No malice 
For it portrays a Tory leadership whose aim , above all , is to be free from any supposedly naive , old-fashioned notions about patriotism or Empire or national greatness . 
A leadership which thinks it oh-so-civilised and cultured to be just a little weary and cynical about everything . 
Socialist Edelman does not present this portrait with political malice . 
Indeed , it is clear that , despite his Coventry connections the Melville attitude is his attitude too . 
But I must draw attention to one fairy-tale element in this otherwise true-to-life novel . 
In avoiding any appearance of party prejudice , Edelman goes so far as to put epigrams — yes , actual epigrams — into the mouths of everyday Tory back-benchers . 
FROM A NEW BOOK , AN INTRIGUING ACCOUNT OF LIFE IN THE LAND OF MISTS The sad , macabre tale of the bride they called Miss Fuegia Basket THE BOOK PAGE by ROBERT PITMAN 
JUST north of the seas that surge and shriek round Cape Horn , the land mass which we call America tails away in a region of mist , sleet , and death . 
The people who live there , scratching a bare living from the rocks or wading into the ice-cold surf to collect limpets , are still among the most wretched on earth . 
Not long ago their life was even more desolate . 
In Britain today it is fashionable to discuss the problem of old age . 
During the last century it was reported that the people north of Cape Horn had solved the problem of what to do with the old folk . 
In times of famine they ate them . 
It is not surprising , therefore , that out of that sleet and mist comes one of the saddest and most macabre little stories that I have ever read . 
I take it from THE WONDERS OF LIFE ON EARTH by the Editors of Life and Lincoln Barnett ( Prentice-Hall , 70s . ) . 
You would be wrong to shudder at the price . 
For a family with a budding biologist in its midst the book is more than worth it . 
In wonderful photographs and paintings it parades the bizarre quirks of evolution — such as the dawn-flying silk moth , with its absurdly long wing-filaments which rustle while it flies . 
The filaments act like the tin-foil dropped by bombers to deceive radar . 
A UNIQUE TONE OF VOICE The Complete Poems of Cavafy . 
Translated by Rae Dalven. 234pp . 
Hogarth Press . 
25s . 
Any new translation of Cavafy is to be welcomed , especially when it claims to be " complete " — and no doubt it is complete in the sense that it covers all those poems which have so far been published in Greek . 
The previous collection in English , translated by Professor Mavrogordato , has long been difficult to acquire . 
Thus this new work fulfils an important need . 
Some of Cavafy 's most celebrated and most characteristic poems were written as early as 1911 and he wrote poems in every subsequent year until his death in 1933 . 
To English readers he was first introduced by E. M. Forster , who , in his Pharos and Pharillon , published in 1923 , wrote a witty and affectionate description of the poet in which occur the significant words " ... a Greek gentleman in a straw hat , standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe " . 
And one is inclined to say that the " slight angle " implies more than eccentricity ( and Cavafy was certainly eccentric ) ; it reminds one , too , of the { leve clinamen of Lucretius — the slight deviation from the regular which is at the root of all creation . 
For one of the first things which strikes one about Cavafy is that he is unique . 
This is a point well made by Mr. Auden in his introduction when he writes : " I have read translations of Cavafy made by many different hands , but every one of them was immediately recognizable as a poem by Cavafy ; nobody else could possibly have written it . " 
This does not mean , of course , that all translations of Cavafy are equally good ; but it does mean that it is almost impossible to translate him in a way that is positively misleading . 
The authentic voice is certain to come through . 
The present translation by Miss Rae Dalven is no exception to the rule . 
Sometimes one may deplore a certain insensitivity to rhythm , and sometimes one may wish that Miss Dalven had been more ambitious — had attempted , for instance , to reproduce the rhyme which Cavafy uses in many of his poems . 
But on the whole the work is careful and exact . 
What Mr. Auden calls Cavafy 's " unique tone of voice " is everywhere recognizable . 
It is not so gracefully represented as in the translations of Professor Mavrogordato , but in quantity this volume has the advantage over the earlier one . 
It is unfortunately doubtful whether the reader will be greatly helped by Mr. Auden 's introduction . 
Early on in this Mr. Auden comes to the odd conclusion that " if the importance of Cavafy 's poetry is his unique tone of voice , there is nothing for a critic to say , for criticism can only make comparisons " . 
This , certainly , does not prevent Mr. Auden from going on himself for seven closely printed pages , which contain few " comparisons " . 
But the pages are not very illuminating . 
Much more sensitive and thorough studies are to be found in Sir Maurice Bowra 's The Creative Experiment and in Mr. Sherrard 's The Marble Threshing Floor . 
These writers are aware that one function of criticism is to explain and they avoid such nearly meaningless statements as , " Cavafy has three principal concerns : love , art , and politics in the original Greek sense " . 
Is it the politics of Homer , of Pericles , of Aristotle ? 
Nothing could be more remote from Cavafy than any of these . 
What is in fact the case is that he was concerned with a view of a Greek 's place in history , a view which was peculiarly his own and which has been found by his contemporaries and successors in the Greek tradition peculiarly true and enlightening . 
It is a view taken from " a slight angle to the universe " , but is none the less accurate for that . 
Nearly the whole of Cavafy 's life was spent in Alexandria . 
This , as can be seen when one knows Cavafy , was a fitting background . 
It was the city founded by Alexander the Great , the city where he was buried , the city above all symbolical of the diffusion of Greek language and culture from the Indus to the far west . 
Of other Greek cities only Athens and Constantinople have equally powerful associations , and the worlds of Alexandria and Constantinople are , of course , utterly different from the world of fifth-century Athens . 
It was out of the world of the Greek dispersal that Cavafy created his personal mythology — a world both of triumph and disaster , a world of courage , of humour and of irony . 
Cavafy was the first modern Greek poet who contrived to be patriotic without being romantic , and his method was to stand at " a slight angle " to what is assumed to be the universe of history . 
His favourite subjects are from Antioch , Alexandria , Byzantium , or from Greek states already subjugated to Rome . 
These are themes which we , in our normal classical education , are encouraged to regard as " decadent " ; and indeed so strong is prejudice that one will still find people who will apply the adjective " decadent " to Cavafy 's poetry . 
It is therefore refreshing to find such a critic as Sir Maurice Bowra , who writes : " ... respect for human courage and character is perhaps Cavafy 's most characteristic note " . 
The same gentle understanding and forceful irony are to be found in the poems that deal with love ( always homosexual love ) . 
Here again Mr. Auden does not help our understanding when he writes : " The erotic world he depicts is one of casual pickups and short-lived affairs . " 
These are sometimes part of the theme , but from such things emerges a splendour of which Mr. Auden seems unaware . 
Has he not read " Myres " or " The Mirror in the Hall " ? 
However , Cavafy can speak , and has spoken , for himself . 
He has been the greatest influence from the past on contemporary Greek poetry and has already influenced poets in many other languages . 
His complete sincerity , his angular stance , his tenderness that is combined with the accuracy of a surgeon , his awareness of the past in the present and of the present in the past , his meticulousness , his grandeur — these are some of the qualities which no reader can fail to observe and which , singly and together , make him one of the greatest writers of our times . 
REBELS WITH A PEN BRUCE INGHAM GRANGER : Political Satire in the American Revolution , 1763-1783. 314pp . 
Cornell University Press . 
London : Oxford University Press . 
40s . 
The American Revolution produced some first-class writing of the solemn and more dignified types . 
Burke on one side of the Atlantic , Jefferson on the other , rose to the height of the great argument . 
But judging from the samples quoted in this learned and interesting book , there were no comic equivalents of Jefferson or even of Thomas Paine at work in North America during these twenty years . 
Dr. Granger has gleaned most thoroughly and has classified various types of political satire in a sensible fashion . 
But with the possible exception of Franklin , none of the writers he exhumes is of great interest today or deserves anything but historical respect . 
Even Hopkinson , even Trumbull are dim figures and M'Fingal is a burlesque much more completely forgotten than Hudibras . 
From the point of view of American literary history , one of the chief types of interest in this book is the evidence it furnishes of the close imitation of English models , of Butler , Swift , Addison , and the contemporary Charles Churchill . 
The versifiers do not display a high degree of technical competence . 
They are , however , bold in the use of rhyme to a degree that would astonish Mr. Ogden Nash . 
Thus , one poetaster rhymes " mouse " with " sous " , treating "sous " as a singular noun . 
Even the comparatively competent Trumbull writes : " 
Behold that martial Macaroni , 
Compound of Phoebus and Bellona . " 
The prose writing seems vastly superior . 
Arbuthnot 's History of John Bull was imitated with some success , and Franklin managed adroitly the humorous atrocity story suggesting that the ministerial troops should castrate the American males . 
It is possible , however , that the editors of the great new edition of Franklin 's works will not accept all the identifications made here . 
The themes reflect the controversies of the age . 
The Quebec Act with its threat of popery provoked a great deal of irrelevant indignation . 
The Royalists were inclined to sneer at the low social origins and vulgar ambitions of the rebel leaders , and Franklin 's reputed irreligion laid him open to attack . 
The rebel propagandists became increasingly hostile to the king and scornful to the royal representatives , civil and military . 
The alleged amorous propensities of these representatives of the Crown were duly noted . 
Their morals as well as their good faith were impugned . 
Hessians , Irish , Welsh were assailed as well as the universally unpopular Scots . 
This is a useful and a mildly entertaining book , although its author does not show that mastery of the political background displayed by Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger , Sr. , in his recent investigation of revolutionary propaganda . 
It is probably useless to protest against the failure to give the Howe brothers their proper titles . 
And the complicated history of George Sackville may excuse the fact that he appears as Lord Germain , a title he never held . 
IN DEFENCE OF LAWRENCE F. J. TEMPLE : D. H. Lawrence . 
237pp . 
Paris : Seghers. 12 N.F. 
It is not difficult to imagine how Lawrence 's habitual and often very outspoken frankness together with his almost incredible confidence in his own insights aroused the resentment of many of those whom he knew . 
( It is true that in his preface to M. Temple 's biography Mr. Richard Aldington claims that he personally bore no grudge at all for the home truths he was asked to swallow . 
He reminds his French readers of Rimbaud 's obscene parting rites in the home of an acquaintance and explains that Lawrence 's own ungrateful mocking of those who had helped him was only to be expected in a great artist . ) 
Someone as courageous as Lawrence in following the promptings of his own intuition is bound to inspire the jealousy or the envy of those who are more timorous and conventional and it is probably for this reason that so few of his critics , whether or not they have known him personally , have been capable of a truly disinterested assessment of his character and genius . 
M. Temple 's short study of the life and works is on the whole eulogistic and he defends Lawrence vigorously against some of the charges that have been brought against him in the past : that he was a precursor of Nazism , that he sentimentalized the noble Mexican savage , that he suffered from the neuroses described in Murry 's Son of Woman and that he earned money to which he was not entitled by publishing Maurice Magnus 's Memoirs . 
It is only occasionally that he gives the impression of not wanting to sound too impressed , as , for example , when he mentions in passing the numerous ( unspecified ) pue2rilite2s in Lawrence 's daily life and in many of his books . 
M. Temple makes good use of the available biographical information . 
He also quotes lengthily and well from Lawrence 's letters . 
If one is forced to conclude that he seriously misrepresents both the life and the work of Lawrence it is not therefore because he is swayed by any deep prejudice or because of any particular inaccuracy ( his worst inaccuracy is to describe Ursula in The Rainbow as Tom Brangwen 's daughter ) . 
The principal defect of this book is that it is written in a style which will convey to the reader little or nothing of the resemblances between Lawrence 's inner life and his own : 
M. Temple writes in cliche2s and in doing so not only distorts the essential biographical facts but attributes cliche2s of thought and expression to Lawrence . 
DEFIANT GESTURES ALFRED MARNAU : Ra " uber-Requiem. 123pp . 
Salzburg : Otto Mu " ller . 
DM. 10.90 . 
Alfred Marnau , who was born in Bratislava in 1918 and has lived in England since before the war , shares with Rilke and Kafka the distinction of having origins which seem to escape national boundaries . 
Like them he also makes of German his own language , which seems hammered out , a medium suggesting sheets of gold leaf . 
SEARCHER FOR ATLANTIS 
" I LOOKED down on the blackness where trees filled the quarry and the valley bottoms , and it seemed that the world , my own home-world , was strange again . " 
Much of Lawrence is suggested by that one sentence from his earliest novel , The White Peacock . 
His own home-world dominates the novels up to Women in Love , is the setting of many of the tales , and is the world to which he returns in Lady Chatterley . 
It is described with a faithfulness that makes Lawrence impressive simply as the recorder of a social scene , but his art , even in the autobiographical Sons and Lovers , is such as to render the familiar original and mysterious . 
This power to make the known world " strange again " is part of his inheritance from the great Romantics . 
The excessive amount of attention at present being given to his treatment of the sexual relationship ( bringing us perilously close to what Lawrence himself despised as " sex in the head " ) must not be allowed to obscure the more fundamental truth that he was the latest , and the most compelling , writer in the English Romantic tradition . 
Coleridge 's definition of the secondary imagination , with its stress on the transmutation of experience by an essentially creative process into something of visionary freshness , can be taken as an exact description of Lawrence 's art ; and the most illuminating parallel to the symbolic passages of The Rainbow and Women in Love , in which this visionary quality is most apparent , are the moments of revelation in such poems as Resolution and Independence and The Prelude . 
This , if not precisely the theme of the collection of essays and reminiscences about D. H. Lawrence edited by Professor Moore , is the underlying truth which they most serve to impress upon the mind of the reader . 
It is consciously there in Mr. Herbert Lindenberger 's " Lawrence and the Romantic Tradition " and probably because of this his essay is the one which seems most consistently and most satisfyingly relevant to the actual effects created by Lawrence 's poems and novels . 
But the frequency with which the contributors to Mr. Moore 's Miscellany resort to discussion of symbol and myth in Lawrence 's work also draws its justification from the almost Wordsworthian preoccupation with " unknown modes of being " and " Fallings from us , vanishings " that give Lawrence his distinctively Romantic quality . 
Mr. Angelo P. Bertocci , for example , picks his way very carefully through the mass of overlapping symbolism in Women in Love to demonstrate how Lawrence 's imagination expands the details of his story in ever widening arcs of significance , and he borrows from Mr. R. A. Foakes the term " image of impression " to describe the mode of this symbolism , so linking it with the poetry of Shelley , Keats , Coleridge and Wordsworth . 
Mr. Jascha Kessler , in " The Myth of The Plumed Serpent " , interprets Kate 's progress towards acceptance of Ramon 's Quetzalcoatl cult in terms of the primitive ritual pattern of " separation — initiation — return " , and two other contributors see in Lawrence 's use of birds in various parts of his work a conscious remoulding of primitive ritual . 
Such comment is legitimate , but it needs the check of a more inclusive , and at the same time more strictly literary , response . 
Myths as such draw their power from psychological sources and depend upon the existence of a socio-religious culture to which no modern writer has real access ( though he may imagine that he has ) . 
His use of myth , whether he wishes it to be so or not , can therefore be only part of a larger artistic purpose . 
The Plumed Serpent is an excellent case in point . 
Mr. Kessler claims that his analysis of this novel makes "all the politics and religious demagoguery " seem irrelevant compared with " the drama of the hidden primal mythic adventure it subserves " . 
Criticism has been misguided and has underestimated the book because it has " seized upon the superficial content of the novel and confused it with the story it is really telling " . 
But it was precisely because the " primal mythic adventure " could not form the total substance of a novel that Lawrence was driven to invent the paraphernalia of a political and religious movement led by Ramon which Mr. Kessler rightly regards as superficial . 
It is impossible to " rescue " the myth from the novel . 
One is left with something which the modern reader inevitably finds too thin , too remote , too reminiscent of the world of fairytale ; it will not stand on its own . 
Yet neither will it stand on the matchboard stage that Lawrence has contrived for it . 
Without the reality of a fully created novelistic world the myth is itself superficial and unconvincing . 
In placing Lawrence within the Romantic tradition Mr. Lindenberger does not make this mistake . 
He begins his essay by making the important distinction between what he calls the " novel of social relations " — which is , in effect , the novel as it has usually displayed itself in English literature , from Jane Austen to Miss Iris Murdoch — and the " symbolist novel " or " romance " . 
Lawrence , of course , belongs to the latter class , and from here Mr Lindenberger goes on to a discussion of Lawrence 's Romanticism , the importance of which has already been stressed . 
But , he then argues , it could be said that : 
Lawrence in his best work was able to fuse the two traditions , and it may well be that his contribution to the history of the novel will be seen in his success in instilling the dominant strain of English fiction with the essentially poetic materials of the romantic tradition . 
This argument is just and in the correct sequence ; it puts the emphasis in the right place . 
The glimpses of " unknown modes of being " are the most arresting and the most memorable things in Lawrence 's novels , but he is aware that when a novel is given over entirely to the Romantic experience it ceases to be a novel . 
Nor is it true to say that the traditional material serves as a foil to set off the episodes in which Lawrence is more deeply engaged . 
The finest of his " symbolist novels " , The Rainbow and Women in Love , are also his most substantial achievements in realism . 
As social history they are already unrivalled , and their characters ( in spite of the now famous letter to Edward Garnett in which Lawrence states that " You must n't look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character " ) are characters in the good old-fashioned sense of the word . 
Above all , his power to render environment in language that not merely describes but re-creates it ( Mr. Mark Schorer writes of this in his contribution to the Miscellany , " Lawrence and the Spirit of Place " ) embeds the Romantic experience in a solid world of sensuous particularity . 
In these novels there is no question of an inner meaning being the true purpose to which the surface of the novel is irrelevant . 
They are coherent wholes . 
The unknown penetrates and fuses with the known to form an indivisible artistic unity . 
Lawrence the novelist is perhaps now beginning to get his due . 
The same can not yet be said for Lawrence the poet . 
Miss Dallas Kenmare has written a small study of D. H. Lawrence , which is in fact a study of the poetry , but one weakness of that book is its unwillingness to recognize the tough , pawky , realistic side of Lawrence expressed in "Pansies " and " Nettles " . 
Even Mr. Alvarez , whose essay in The Shaping Spirit ( here reprinted by Professor Moore ) is undoubtedly the best thing yet written on Lawrence 's poetry , seems reluctant to give the blunt , sardonic quality its full value . 
He comments excellently on " Red Geranium and Godly Mignonette " : " There is neither a jot of pretentiousness in the poem , nor of vulgarity , though the opportunity for both certainly offered " , yet he seems to want to dignify it — oddly enough , by suggesting that it is a poem of wit which , like Donne 's , is " a manifestation of intelligence " . 
This is a minor aberration , however . 
The most important aspect of Lawrence 's realism , his "complete truth to feeling " , is thoroughly grasped by Mr. Alvarez , and the essential effect of balance — the balance of the sharply aware , never half-asleep , whole man — created by Lawrence 's flexibly colloquial language is something which this essay argues so persuasively as to leave the greatness of Lawrence 's poetic achievement beyond doubt . 
What Lawrence owed to his working-class background has received some attention in recent years , but not enough . 
The facts are there in Professor Moore 's own biography of Lawrence , The Intelligent Heart . 
Their full significance has yet to be appreciated . 
Two items in the Miscellany have some bearing on this — unintentionally supporting one another . 
The first is a letter from Katherine Mansfield to S. S. Koteliansky describing a row between Lawrence and Frieda at Zennor in 1916 . 
Katherine Mansfield is shocked and bewildered : " It seems to me so degraded — so horrible to see I ca n't stand it . " 
( Actually , it reads like a particularly violent farce . 
Lawrence beats Frieda and chases her round the kitchen table , but the next day gives her breakfast in bed and trims her hat . ) 
The second is a reprinting from Culture and Society of Mr. Raymond Williams 's essay on " The Social Thinking of D. H. Lawrence " . 
Mr. Williams 's cool remark that comment on working-class life "tends to emphasize the noisier factors " inevitably throws one back to the Katherine Mansfield letter . 
Frieda , of course , was a German aristocrat , and by 1916 Lawrence had come a good way from Eastwood , but is it not possible that their middle-class friends were witnessing in these open rows the continuance of a different tradition ? 
At any rate , Mr. Williams is certainly right in his comment that in working-class life ( of Lawrence 's childhood , if not of our day ) "the suffering and the giving of comfort , the common want and the common remedy , the open row and the open making-up , are all part of a continuous life which , in good and bad , makes for a whole attachment " , and the relevance of this to Lawrence 's own treatment of personal relations hardly needs comment . 
No one , however , is as good , or as prolific , a commentator on Lawrence as Lawrence himself , and such an immense amount of this commentary is stored away in Phoenix that its reappearance now after many years of being out of print is a happening of some importance . 
Phoenix is itself a miscellany , unplanned , yet unified as no other miscellany could be , by the personality of Lawrence himself . 
Some of the things it contains are of rare quality , some interesting for what they add to our understanding of Lawrence 's " philosophy " , some are comparatively trivial pieces ; but what matters even more than their individual merits is the cumulative effect which they achieve when brought together in this way . 
The sum even of the novels and poems is greater than the parts , but the existence of a collective meaning , subtly influenced by the presence of the author ( which is always felt in Lawrence 's work ) , can be more easily perceived in the sum of Phoenix . 
The parts can be exasperating . 
Lawrence 's hectoring manner in Democracy grates on the reader , and there are times when his bullying repetitions become insufferable . 
The incantatory style of The Reality of Peace is nauseating , and though it is a relief to turn to the bluff no-nonsense of Education of the People , this sounds after a while like wilful crudeness . 
Yet overriding these defects is the sense that here is an essentially fine and original intelligence — an energy that drives towards real understanding , as against the neat and clever formulations that are so often passed off for understanding . 
One 's irritation evaporates . 
There is much talk in Phoenix of the " blood-consciousness " through which Lawrence sought salvation from the debilitating effects of twentieth-century self-consciousness . 
Sometimes in his hatred of its evils he seems to want to sweep away the whole of modern science and technology . 
The " Autobiographical Fragment " strongly suggests the influence of William Morris 's News from Nowhere . 
But when he is saying more precisely what he means Lawrence makes it clear that the labour-saving machine is a public benefactor : " Now there is a railing against the machine , as if it were an evil thing . " 
New Books ( continued ) PROGRESS IN SCIENCE SCIENCE SURVEY 2 . 
Edited by A. W. HASLETT and JOHN ST . 
JOHN . 
Vista Books . 
30s . 
A year ago the first volume in this series successfully established the pattern which is here continued . 
The editors ask some 20 to 30 working scientists to report on the progress made in selected and limited fields which are their particular concern . 
They appear grouped together , three or four at a time , under more general heads , with some useful cross references and a good index ; each short chapter contains suggestions for further reading . 
Very little knowledge of the subject under discussion is presupposed , though in spite of its clarity this could not be a " popular " work for people innocent of all scientific training . 
It seems aimed in particular at the sixth-former beginning to specialize , who ought to be given every chance to read such first-hand accounts of the advances made in subjects whose dead past is already all too familiar from the text-books . 
In his Foreword Professor Le Gros Clark puts it explicitly : " 
Today , when the demand for more and more recruits in the different branches of science has become so insistent , it is of the highest importance that the interest of potential scientists should be early aroused by having accounts of current trends in scientific research presented in a readily intelligible style . 
" FUTURE EFFECT 
Surveys such as these at regular intervals may well have a real effect on the future through their power to draw the attention of young scientists to interesting fields of activity . 
Only a brief account of the contents is possible here . 
Two articles on astronomy deal in turn with stellar evolution and the determination of stellar distances . 
Curiously the only contribution to pure physics is a description of recent tests of the particular and general theories of relativity . 
Then come articles about the possible ways in which mountain ranges were built up , and magnetic methods of testing the theory of continental drift . 
These are particularly stimulating because little can be taken for granted in sciences at so complex and unsettled a stage . 
DEEP WATER 
After the earth come the oceans , with observations of the sea floor and of currents . 
A study of plant life in the sea makes the transition to connected articles on the chemistry of plants , and accounts of work on the transmission of nerve impulses and the physiology of muscular activity . 
A section on psychology , " brain and mind " , treats of the improvement with practice of the ability of animals to learn , the measurement of human mental qualities , their localization in areas of the brain , and the effect of the newer drugs on behaviour . 
This is a particularly controversial area in which scientists easily stray beyond their competence , and there are one or two remarks , such as " whereas the taking of alcohol has always been regarded as a social and moral question , the giving of drugs , irrespective of their consequences , must always primarily be a medical responsibility " , which certainly demand further discussion . 
We return to solid scientific ground with the assessment of noise annoyance , the strength of materials , metal fatigue , and materials for use at high temperatures . 
Altogether this is a useful piece of work , which has increased our debt to the British Association . 
THE REAL FRANCE { VILLAGE EN VAUCLUSE . 
By L. WYLIE and A. BE2GUE2 . 
Harrap . 
18s . 
This is a shorter version , in French , by M. Armand Be2gue2 , of a much longer American sociological study compiled by Mr. Laurence Wylie of Harvard University , using the " field " techniques of sociology , anthropology and psychology , applied during Mr. Wylie 's year 's stay in 1950 with his wife and two sons in a village which he calls Peyrane . 
DEEP STUDY 
He presents not a dull statistical treatise nor a light surface-skimming digest , but an examination in depth including e.g. the basic principles of French education and comparative family budgets . 
Nor does he neglect the individual and his psychological reactions — the village grocer 's tirade against { la famille nombreuse coming to her shop for credit and the returned deportee 's judgment on the Maquis are but two examples of vivid reportage . 
There are two maps , an adequate vocabulary and intelligent questions in French at the end of each chapter . 
The author 's many excellent photographs make an integral and illuminating contribution to this attempt to give students " a valid picture of contemporary French life and to show how a group of French people live from day to day " . 
This is a fascinating book , from the evocative drawing on its title-page to its valuable final chapter , " { Peyrane en 1959 " , written after further visits , recording the changes brought by tractors , television and main drainage and providing a useful corrective to so many nostalgic pictures of a " quaint " old-fashioned France . 
It merits inclusion in any modern-languages library and could be a stimulating basis for a non-literary sixth-form course or a good adult class . 
OXFORD PAPERBACKS 
Martin Cooper 's French Music , a study covering the period from the death of Berlioz to the death of Faure2 , has now been issued as an Oxford Paperback ( Oxford University Press , 7s. 6d . ) . 
Ernest Barker 's Principles of Social and Political Theory ( price 7s. 6d. ) and C. K. Allen 's Law in the Making ( price 10s. 6d. ) are among other additions to the series . 
REVIEWS IN BRIEF CALDERO2N : { LA VIDA ES SUEN4O . 
Edited by A. E. SLOMAN . 
Manchester University Press . 
8s. 6d . 
This edition , with Introduction and Notes by Professor A. E. Sloman , fulfils the need for a new , modern text of the play . 
It is based on the text in the 1636 edition of { La Primera Parte de Comedias and takes into account the two Parte texts of 1640 , the Vera Tassis edition of 1685 and the Zaragoza version of 1636 . 
It thus makes use of , as no previous edition has done , all the known texts of the play . 
Professor Sloman has brought spelling up to date , except where this would involve changes in pronunciation , accentuation and capitalization . 
In the Introduction he has covered every aspect of the play under the headings of Date , Sources , Structure and Theme , Language and Metres , Staging and Texts . 
Although the scholarly thoroughness with which every point is treated would satisfy the more advanced and ardent student , the clear and concise manner in which the material is presented makes it interesting and easily digestible for the general or less ambitious reader . 
In particular , the subject of Structure and Theme is discussed very fully , with frequent references to the play itself , and including brief comments on all the characters . 
Throughout , he indicates Caldero2n 's subtlety as a dramatist . 
A list of books is provided for further reading on the subject under the headings of " Caldero2n in general " and " Recent criticism of { La Vida es Suen4o " . 
The Notes , as Professor Sloman himself remarks , are concerned in part with the most interesting of the variant readings he has considered , and also contain comments on classical allusions , passages which present difficulty in comprehension , and differences between Caldero2n 's vocabulary and syntax and those of present-day Spanish . 
For further assistance , a short index of annotated words and names is included . 
In addition to these considerations the high quality of paper and printing , and the low cost ( contributed to by a rather flimsy cover ) make the book admirably suited to school use . 
It is certain to commend itself quickly to the notice of the examining boards . 
SNORKEL DIVER . 
First Steps in Underwater Swimming . 
By R. B. MATKIN and G. F. BROOKES . 
Macdonald . 
12s. 6d . 
This is a book with plenty of enthusiasm for a sport that has gained rapidly in popularity . 
Few people would attempt to take up underwater swimming without an experienced companion to guide them and they would be ill-advised to try but here they will learn most of the pleasures the sport has in store ; how to practise in a swimming bath ; and how to remain completely safe . 
Many people must have been excited by the thrills and perils of M. Cousteau 's Silent World or been urged to explore the shallow fringes by Miss Rachel Carson 's The Sea Around Us only to be left the feeling that this was beyond them . 
If they swim at all some of the pleasures could be had without the dangers . 
For although snorkel diving is not to be confused with using an aqualung it is proper introduction to it and it is within everybody 's means . 
Anyone who swims can learn to use the simple equipment to get more fun out of his bathing . 
Even a comparative beginner can try underwater photography . 
The book is small and unpretentious but not dull and it could encourage many young readers to take the plunge . 
PRACTICAL INORGANIC AND ORGANIC PROBLEMS . 
By M. BROWN . 
Longmans. 4s. 9d . 
It is true , as the author says , that practical chemistry in schools consists largely of volumetric and qualitative analysis , at the examination stage . 
It is also true that this does little more than provide training in manipulation , coupled with some knowledge of reactions . 
The theme here is to give a number of problems which can be solved by carrying out prescribed reactions , followed by application of the principles involved . 
Some university boards and scholarship awarding bodies have used this approach for a long time and the author has been able to use many of the problems which have been set for their examinations . 
To complete the range of work he has added problems which he has himself devised . 
In the organic section he has included a number of reaction schemes in which the student is required to carry out tests on the original , intermediate and final products , which serve to enlighten the deductive processes . 
The function of the book is highly commendable . 
Most teachers , however , faced with the difficulty of raising the largest number of examination candidates to O and A level in the short time available , will shrink from embarking on a scheme which , however educative , demands a level of intellectual ability which only a smaller number of candidates will achieve . 
The university boards could support the author 's initiative by requiring that all candidates tackle a question of this type . 
THE WEAVER 'S BOOK . 
By HARRIET TIDBALL . 
Macmillan , New York . 
38s. 6d . 
In spite of the description on the dust jacket this is not really a book for the absolute beginner . 
It is , however , an excellent text-book for the serious weaver who wishes to attain a high standard of craftsmanship and who is willing to spend the time necessary to explore the many possibilities of design in this ancient craft . 
In addition to chapters on the loom , yarns and preparations for weaving , much of the book is devoted to drafting and a thorough description of the various possible weaves . 
The 109 drafts illustrated are methodically grouped and to them are added some excellent photographs of the finished weaves . 
Miss Tidball 's book is the result of much practical experience and contains much sound advice , not only for the beginner but also for the more practical weaver . 
The London Theatre YOUNG WRITERS ON THE MOVE From a Correspondent 
Although Mr. Edward Albee 's first play had its first performance here , at the Arts Theatre , he is better known as a dramatist on the continent and in New York . 
On the evidence of The Death of Bessie Smith and The American Dream , the double bill at the Royal Court , this is a state of affairs that will soon be put right . 
In passing one must say how good it is to see the short play beginning to have a look in again . 
During the past two or three years we have often seen plays by the most promising of playwrights spoiled by the absurd necessity of inflating a natural three-quarters of an hour into a full theatrical evening . 
The Death of Bessie Smith tells a simple and terrible story in a laconic , highly charged manner . 
On a hot afternoon , in a crumbling house near Memphis , Tennessee , a nurse is getting ready to go to work ; her old father , dreaming of past splendours , is infuriated by the blues wailing out of his daughter 's gramophone . 
NEXT WEEK 'S ENTERTAINMENT IN THE CITY CARNE 'S STUDY OF YOUTH 'S AIMLESSNESS 
THE youth whose symptom is a strange restlessness and a desire to take the best from life without putting anything into it — the Beatnik — is depicted in " { Les Tricheurs " ( Youthful Sinners ) , the film coming to the Rex next week , directed by the brilliant Frenchman , Marcel Carne . 
The setting is St. Germain-des-Pres and the Latin Quarter of Paris , but it could be anywhere where semi-students and semi-idle youth forgathers , with negative emotions , drowning doubts in jazz and drink , betting stupidly and cheating with life , love and truth . 
ACTING AWARDS 
Marcel Carne does not condemn them ; he believes that their way of life is caused through lack of parental interest , and hopes , that through this film , some of these adults will wake up to their responsibilities . 
" { Les Tricheurs " was the most successful film to be shown in France last year . 
It was awarded the { Grand Prix du Cinema Francais , and its two stars , Pascale Petit and Jacques Charrier , were given the best actress and actor award of the year for their performances . 
Mummers In Play Debut 
To follow their successful production of " All My Sons " by Arthur Miller , shortly to be presented again for the Arts Theatre , C.U. Mummers will give the first Cambridge presentation of " The Dream of Peter Mann " by Bernard Kops at the A.D.C. Theatre next week . 
Kops is well known for his " Hamlet of Stepney Green , " whose production at the Arts two years ago caused such widespread interest . 
" The Dream of Peter Mann , " whose only previous production was at last year 's Edinburgh Festival , sees Kops striking a balance between the urgency of his ideas and his talent for vital , colourful entertainment . 
It is to run at the A.D.C. from Tuesday to Saturday of next week at 8.15 , with a 2.30 matinee on Saturday . 
GUINNESS AND MILLS CONFLICT 
BASED on the best selling novel by James Kennaway , the controversial " Tunes of Glory , " comes to the Regal Cinema next week to give cinema-goers the opportunity of seeing two of Britain 's most brilliant actors . 
For playing the leading parts of two C.O. 's of a Highland Regiment are Alec Guinness and John Mills , the one having won the affection of his men by leading them through the war , and the other a hard , efficient newcomer who is heartily disliked by the majority of the soldiers . 
The relationship between the two men and their influence on the regiment forms the basis of the plot , while the affairs of the soldiers in their off-time , provides an opportunity to introduce some glamour into this tough and tragic film . 
Supporting roles are played by Dennis Price , John Fraser , Kay Walsh and Susannah Yorke . 
The film is produced by Colin Leslie and directed by Ronald Neaman . 
CHRISTIE PLAY ON FILM 
Following the West End stage success of "The Spider 's Web , " Agatha Christie 's thriller has now been made into a film starring Jack Hulbert , Cicely Courtneidge , Glynis Johns and John Justin . 
It is to be shown at the Central Cinema next week . 
The action covers one day in the lives of the occupants of a pleasant country house who find they have a body on their hands shortly before the arrival of an important foreign diplomat . 
GUEST ARTIST 
At all costs this must be covered up so that the important conference with the V.I.P. can take place , and it is in this endeavour that the plot develops , drawing into it a number of mysterious suspects . 
Introducing 13 years old Wendy Turner to the screen as the daughter of the household , the film also enables David Nixon to make a guest appearance . 
New Group 's Arts Visit 
" The Glass Menagerie , " thought by some American critics to be Tennessee Williams ' greatest play , it is undoubtedly his most heart-felt , has not yet been performed professionally in Cambridge . 
At the Arts Theatre next week , it will be presented by the Group of Three , a new company recently created by Charles Vance , who will direct the play with the same cast — Imogen Moynihan , Ben Hawthorne , Joan Shore and himself — that has won critical acclaim elsewhere . 
Charles Vance comes from a theatrical family especially well-known in Northern Ireland . 
Of the other members of the Group of Three , Imogen Moynihan has experience in management as well as being an actress of talent and Joan Shore has been delighting audiences at Ipswich , Northampton , Cromer and other theatres in East Anglia . 
Ben Hawthorne , a young New Zealand actor of great promise , has the important role of the son in "The Glass Menagerie , " and completes a cast that is an unusually well-balanced team . 
Backstage "Slums " 
Substantial improvements have taken place over a wide range of theatres since 1946 , but there are still far too many theatrical slums which could be vastly improved at small cost , declares the quarterly " Equity Letter . " 
It calls on all members of the British Actors ' Equity Association to write asking their M.P.s to urge the Government not to omit theatres from the proposed legislation concerning amenities in shops and offices . 
Two Artists Who Live In Mills WHERE PAINTS &MUSIC GO TOGETHER ... 
MUSIC and painting live side by side complimenting each other at Pampisford Mill , the home of the Campbell-Taylors . 
While her 24 years old daughter practises at her grand piano , Mrs. Campbell-Taylor is often painting at the other end of their ground floor studio . 
" I can paint better with music as my companion , " she said . 
The mill has been converted attractively . 
The river swirls a few yards from the front door and provides just the setting of this artistic family . 
Mrs. Campbell-Taylor does not like to trade on her husband 's name — he is a Royal Academician — so she uses her maiden name of Brenda Moore . 
Specialising in portraits she resumed her profession five years ago having seen her daughter launched in her own career as a pianist and teacher . 
Won Scholarships 
Her art training started when , at the age of 14 , she was sent for a trial term to the Oxford School of Art . 
Later she went to the Brighton School and was awarded a local scholarship . 
When she was 20 years old she won a leaving scholarship to the Royal Academy Schools . 
One of the first visiting members of the Royal Academy to instruct her was Mr. Campbell-Taylor who was to become her husband five years later . 
Rather than branch into commercial art on leaving the Academy , she became an apprentice to a picture frame maker , and still makes mounts for her water colours and drawings . 
Although her painting career was interrupted , she helped her husband and continued to accumulate painting knowledge . 
" You never lose the ability to paint once you have absorbed the first principles in art — practise is not as essential in painting as it is for instrument playing , " she says . 
Child Portraits 
On the difference between the professional and the amateur artist , Mrs. Campbell-Taylor said : " It could not be defined by income or pay packet . 
" The professional is never satisfied with an easy answer and believes that nothing is so worth-while as the problem that arouses all the receptivity , excitement and competence he is capable of experiencing which tuition has accelerated . 
" For the amateur it is an emotional outlet which can also have its own monetary value in these days . " 
In the studio she has some delightful portraits and drawings of children , so I asked if she particularly enjoyed this type of work . 
Mrs. Campbell-Taylor replied that while having no preference for the age of her subject , she did find painting children particularly interesting and often a challenge . 
She usually stays with the family and makes studies of the child when asleep before attempting the painting . 
" You really have to get an idea of the personality and form before you start . 
" It is as exciting and difficult for a child to sit as it is for the painter to paint . 
" Clay Modelling 
" The fun of portrait painting , " she added , " is in trying to assess and understand the temperament of the people you are painting . " 
As an artist she has learned a considerable amount from clay modelling , which she has exhibited as well as paintings — including one of the anointing of the Queen Mother , then Queen , at the coronation of George 6 — at the Royal Academy . 
And recently Mrs. Campbell-Taylor had two drawings at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters ' Exhibition . 
... AND A STUDIO THAT WILL BE LIT BY GLASS DOME 
I MET another artist who will soon be living in a mill — this time a windmill at Hemingford Grey . 
Mrs. Jeanette Jackson , a London abstract painter who is currently exhibiting her work in Cambridge , hopes the conversion of the windmill will be completed by the early autumn . 
The windmill has been admired by Mrs. Jackson since childhood and many times , like Jimmy Edwards , she has attempted to buy it , at last being successful . 
It will have a glass dome to let in the light , and the four floors will give plenty of studio room . 
Frame Problem 
The family — she has a son at Trinity and one daughter — will spend their week-ends at Hemingford Grey , Mrs. Jackson working as an art teacher in a London school during the week . 
The day I met her she had a problem on her hands . 
One of her paintings , 8 ft. by 5 ft. was sent unframed to the Women 's International Art Club 's exhibition . 
It came back that morning with a frame , and would not go through the front or back door . 
Mrs. Jackson is an extraordinary prolific painter . 
In one year she paints more than 200 pictures , though not all these survive her critical scrutiny . 
Other Interests 
She is " passionately fond of cooking . " 
Having lived in Germany for several years she always cooks their national dishes for her friends unless they are foreigners — then she always cooks roast beef and apple pie . 
Her other interest is collecting Victoriana . 
When she first started this 25 years ago she bought a Victorian chair for 7s 6d. , which she is sure will now fetch somewhere in the region of £30 . 
A SOLDIER WHO TURNED TO POTTERY AT AGE OF 52 Work Of Reychan Exhibited At Heffer Gallery 
THE Heffer Gallery have just opened an exhibition of the works of Stanislas Reychan , the Polish soldier who began training as a potter at the age of 52 . 
His remarkable success must be due to some extent to heredity — he is of the fifth generation in a family of potters — but heredity can not explain everything . 
Almost everyone must have seen his pieces of pottery sculpture at some time or another . 
The shiny little black bulls , with curly foreheads lowered ; the rather pear-shaped Adam and Eve figures sitting happily under a snake-entwined tree in a pottery Eden — pieces like these must be familiar to thousands . 
Reychan has exhibited in the Open Air Exhibitions in London , and for the past six years at the Royal Academy . 
His work has been welcomed as an important modern flowering of the tradition which produced the exquisite pieces of Bow and Chelsea , and the curiosities of Staffordshire . 
Reychan 's knights in armour , his medieval heroes , classical personalities , are undeniably works of art of a very vital and individual kind . 
Their appeal , being modern , is direct and uncomplicated . 
In spite of the humour that has gone into a good many of them , they are not without dignity . 
Two companion pieces , Lion and Unicorn , are rather attractive ; Hercules ( taming a lion ) , Silenus ( his arm thrown blissfully over a barrel ) , a centaur , executed in unglazed red earthenware , turning to shoot an arrow back over his shoulder — these are just a few that catch the eye , among many . 
Their prices , considered against the prices of more conventional pottery , are certainly not excessive . 
P.O. Selwyn Mitre Players Good Choice 
SHAKESPEARE 'S "Two Gentlemen of Verona , " this year 's production by the Selwyn Mitre Players , has emerged as a choice well-suited to the available talent , and in general commendable for its boldness , fluency and straight forward interpretation . 
Performed in the College Hall against a dark backcloth , with no scenery other than an odd chair or table to relieve the bareness of the stage , it naturally depended entirely upon the acting for its success . 
The Post review of next week 's shows ANOTHER FROM " SALAD DAYS " STABLE 
THE team behind the longest running musical in the world ( " Salad Days " ) have come up with another musical which goes to the West End the week after it has finished at the NOTTINGHAM THEATRE ROYAL . 
The latest from the pens and pianos of Julian Slade and Dorothy Reynolds is " Wildest Dreams , " due to open at the Vaudeville on August 3 . 
" Wildest Dreams " is set in Nelderham , a country town in which a girl called Carol , just out of school , meets Mark , a young reporter sent to write up in satirical terms the town 's reactions to his newspaper 's questionnaire . 
As in " Salad Days , " the young couple have personality and purpose . 
Carol , though monosyllabic , rebellious and scruffy in the manner of some of the modern young , has a strong vision of her character and a determination to preserve it in the teeth of her aunt 's interference . 
And Mark believes he has it in him to convert a whole country town . 
Anna Dawson plays the girl . 
Now 24 , she got her first theatrical chance in a previous Slade-Reynolds musical , " Free as Air , " and , apart from pantomime and repertory experience , has been in " Marigold " at the Savoy . 
John Baddeley , who partners her as Mark , was also in " Free as Air , " as well as " Follow That Girl . " 
Aged 27 , he is an actor whose experience has varied from repertory at Birmingham , Sheffield , the Bristol Old Vic and Guildford to a tour in " The Lilac Domino . " 
With Julian Slade at the piano , Miss Reynolds plays the domineering aunt , who meets a composer who tries to sing his own songs ( Angus Mackay — in private life Miss Reynold 's husband ) . 
The musical numbers are by Basil Pattison , and decor by Brian Currah , who recently designed for " The Caretaker . " 
PLAYHOUSE : Third week of " Second Post , " a revue of 28 items by various authors , produced by Val May before he leaves for Bristol Old Vic . 
Targets range from the familiar skits on " Beat the Clock " and " The Archers " to the offbeat , with a cast of thirteen topped by Rhoda Lewis and Arthur Blake . 
City Cinemas 
Following the same formula of a tearaway technique compounded of slapstick and { 6double entendre , the sequel to " Dentist in the Chair " is " Dentist on the Job " at the ABC and METROPOLE cinemas . 
In this , the manager of a firm putting out a new toothpaste ( Eric Barker ) gets a couple of dentists to endorse it . 
It seems a good opportunity for the Dean of King Alfred 's Dental College ( likewise Eric Barker ) to unload a brace of recently graduated deadheads , Bob Monkhouse and Ronnie Stevens . 
With dental mechanic Kenneth Connor , just out of gaol , they dream up schemes to promote the new paste . 
In the process they meet Shirley Eaton — in a bubble bath on to which they turn a wind machine . 
Their biggest achievement , however , is when they hear that the Americans are launching a satellite which will broadcast a tape recording of goodwill for seven years . 
Now if a tape extolling the virtues of their toothpaste could be substituted ... ? 
Some hardworking man at the Disney studios has counted the spots on the Dalmatians in " One Hundred and One Dalmatians " at the ODEON . 
Each dog wears 32 to 72 spots , depending on which side is exposed to the viewer — which accounts for 6,469,952 dancing spots . 
Which is only right and proper in a 4,000,000-dollar production involving 800 miles of drawings , 1,000 colours and 800 tons of paint . 
The most sophisticated to date of Disney 's 53 features , " One Hundred and One Dalmatians , " brings together a human bachelor who owns a Dalmatian called Pongo and a shapely girl who owns one called Perdita . 
It is love at first sight , marriage at first opportunity , and soon fifteen beautiful puppies are born ( to the Dalmatians , that is ) . 
But enter a villainess , Cruella De Vil , rich , cunning and with a passion for coats made of Dalmatian hides . 
She dognaps the pups and puts them with 101 others in a haunted old English manor house . 
Scotland Yard is baffled , but the dogs of London get on to the scent . 
With "Gunlight at Sandoval , " Tech . 
Texas Ranger Tom Tryon avenges death of friend killed trying to prevent bank hold-up . 
Dan Duryea . 
It was inevitable that Peter Ustinov should join the exclusive four-star club by writing , producing , directing and starring in one film . 
In " Romanoff and Juliet , " at the GAUMONT , he is literally a four-star general , not to mention also being President and UN representative of the tiny country of Concordia , so small that even UN colleagues ca n't locate it on the map . 
But the President wants to keep it that way , knowing that when it is discovered it will be either swamped with aid or blown OFF the map . 
Love and laughter , he feels , engender more happiness than politics or philanthropy . 
At a meeting of the United Nations he causes pandemonium by abstaining on an important vote involving an amendment to an amendment to an amendment , and on his return to Concordia becomes the target for the Russian ambassador , Romanoff , and the American ambassador , Moulsworth , both of whom insist on giving his country aid . 
Keeping a wary eye on each other , they woo Concordia — while their respective offspring ( John Gavin and Sandra Dee ) are breaking down international barriers with a spot of wooing themselves . 
Technicolor . 
With "A Date with Death , " Gerald Mohr tracks policeman 's killer . 
In the roaring expansion of the West a century ago , no town is more terrorised than " Warlock " ( ELITE ) where the people have been reduced to a handful of cowardly citizens as one sheriff after another is murdered or run out of town in the monthly beat-up the place receives from a bunch of cowboys from the San Pablo ranch . 
The brawlers , drinkers and killers include Richard Widmark , who has grown to hate these descents on the defenceless town since he took part in the massacre of harmless Mexicans . 
In desperation of ever getting a new sheriff who can protect them by law , the townsfolk hire Henry Fonda who will be able to use his fast gunplay and be above the law . 
Accompanied by crippled gambler Anthony Quinn , the new Marshal arrives and makes his mark . 
Sickened by all the lawless killing , Widmark throws in his lot with him . 
Dorothy Malone . 
CinemaScope , Tech . 
With "Between Heaven and Hell , " CinemaScope , Terry Moore feels that the feudal attitude husband Robert Wagner has towards the sharecroppers on his land will one day cause trouble . 
And when he is called into the army , it does . 
MECHANICS : " There Was a Crooked Man . " 
Ex army explosives expert Norman Wisdom is persuaded to join gang of safecrackers by the argument that if there were n't any criminals , all the clergymen , police and probation officers would be out of work . 
After a few successes , the gang disguise themselves as American army officers and work a gigantic swindle by blowing up an entire town . 
Susannah York . 
Alfred Marks . 
With "Trapeze , " crippled and embittered by a fall , circus star Burt Lancaster refuses to teach American acrobat Tony Curtis the dangerous triple somersault . 
Whirling round in the circus tent , they solve an emotional triangle involving Gina Lollobrigida . 
In Japan , apparently , they play something called "The Cola Game , " described at the SCALA . 
A circle of boys and girls place a Coca-Cola bottle on its side and spin it . 
When it stops , the couple to whom it points must make love in front of the others which explains why Coca-Cola sells very well in Japan . 
A pretty young co-ed named Junko gets into the game and thus meets a youngster with whom she has an affair . 
Discovering herself pregnant she has an abortion , but her lover could n't care less and goes off on a ski-ing trip with the girl in the next apartment . 
Junko moves out of his flat and goes to live with a young architect whom she respects greatly and who feels sorry for her . 
In this way , it says here , " she experiences the true meaning of love and happiness . " 
X-certificate . 
Phillipe Lemarre has been the scapegoat of some doubtful pals in " { Les Clandestines " at the MOULIN ROUGE . 
Sent to gaol for two years , he has quixotically , refused to clear himself by betraying his colleagues , and , when he gets out , finds his grandfather has been driven to suicide by a bunch of crooks . 
Now there is a thriving call-girl racket operating from the old man 's apartment which they have taken over . 
With the help of blonde mannequin Nicole Courcel , the released prisoner pieces the story together . 
With "The Parasites , " Jeanne Moreau is a streetgirl forever searching for real love in Montmartre . 
When her protector is betrayed to the police she gets entangled with other shadowy creatures of the underworld . 
Both films X-certificate . 
The Post review of next week 's shows JESSIE AND RALPH TWINKLE AGAIN 
TWO veterans of the twenties and thirties — one remembered for her vivacity in musicals , and the other for his assinities in a series of world famous farces — visit Nottingham next week as a team . 
Jessie Matthews and Ralph Lynn come to the THEATRE ROYAL in a farce called " Port in a Storm " by Rex Howard Arundel . 
The ex "Cochran young lady " and the monocled " ass " of so many pieces of Ben Travers at the Aldwych are cast respectively as a crime novelist and her old flame . 
She hides him at home when he is on the run from his virago of a wife until she discovers that she is also harbouring a stolen diamond necklace . 
The writer has a house staff of ex-convicts to keep her in touch with the way of the underworld , and the farce 's ingredients include a long-lost son , a runaway secretary and a lock-picking butler . 
The play is on its pre-London tour . 
Jessie Matthews made her first appearance on the stage in 1917 when she was ten years old , and took to revue five years later . 
She made her first hit while still in her teens , understudying Gertrude Lawrence in America , and when she came back to London she twinkled for many years as C. B. Cochran 's brightest discoveries in shows that ranged from " This Year of Grace " and " One Damn Thing After Another " to the famous " Evergreen " which , as well as being made into a film , ran for two years . 
Miss Matthews last came to the Nottingham Theatre Royal in 1955 when she and her daughter Katie played in Coward 's " Private Lives . " 
NEARLY 80 
Now a lively 79 , Ralph Lynn has been going strong on the stage since 1900 ( when he appeared in " King of Terrors " at Wigan ) , and about 1925 was up to his debonair tricks at the old repertory theatre in Hyson Green , Nottingham , when the Grand was a going concern . 
He , Tom Walls and Robertson Hare made the name of the Aldwych synonymous with farce through such classics of foolery as " Cuckoo in the Nest , " " Thark " and " Rookery Nook . " 
Mr. Lynn and his bald sparring partner appeared at the Theatre Royal in 1952 in the premiere of a later Ben Travers farce , " Wild Horses . " 
They were together again two years later in Peter Jones 's " The Party Spirit . " 
Mr. ( " Oh , calamity ! " ) 
Hare can be seen again in Nottingham , by the way , on October 16 , when he plays in the tour of " The Bride Come Back " with Jack Hulbert and Cicely Courtneidge . 
PLAYHOUSE : Fourth and positively final week of the revue " Second Post " twenty-eight items of song , sketch and dance by various authors . 
Two of them have just been sold for the new West End revue " The Lord Chamberlain Regrets " — " Lady of the Camellias , " in which Rhoda Lewis sings { 6a la Dietrich , and " Cries of Old London " involving three decrepit bellringers and a stomach-heaving " sick " joke . 
City Cinemas 
A ten-year-old opus by Alfred Hitchcock is re-issued at the ABC and METROPOLE — his "Strangers on a Train . " 
A long train journey often prompts complete strangers to strike up a casual conversation . 
They will talk about the weather , politics or crime . 
But it 's rare for two people to talk about murder on a personal level . 
FILM PAGE by F. Leslie Winters Hollywood decides that 1961 wo n't be a Super Colossal year 
HAVING looked back on 1960 last week , it is now time to think of 1961 and the films it will bring . 
As far as Hollywood activities go , my correspondent there says that , after preliminary box-office results of " The Alamo " and "Spartacus , " there is a big drop in super-colossal productions and emphasis trends to intimate little pictures with Sex as the big motif . 
This follows the invasion of European films in America . 
Here I have selected 25 coming British films which look promising of their types . 
A picture which must strictly be regarded as American yet which has a British star and director is " Lawrence of Arabia , " with Peter O'Toole and made by David " River Kwai " Lean . 
Our own Michael Anderson has also made the drama-thriller "The Naked Edge " with American Gary Cooper and BritishU.S . 
Deborah Kerr . 
Peter Finch , for whom 1960 was triumphant , will be seen in a political drama " No Love for Johnnie , " while Peter Sellers stars and directs a big business drama " Mr. Topaze . " 
SOPHISTICATED 
Richard Todd will be seen in a sophisticated comedy and a war drama — " Do n't Bother to Knock " and "The Long and the Short and the Tall . " 
Another star who is also directing is Nigel Patrick and his film is " Johnny Nobody , " with Aldo Ray and Yvonne Mitchell as well . 
We also have such extremes as " Carry On Regardless , " with a cast you could pretty well guess , and " Macbeth , " with Maurice Evans and Judith Anderson . 
Stanley Baker will be on the wrong side of the law for a change in " The Criminal , " and so will Michael Craig in "Payroll . " 
Crime will also be the theme of " Frightened City , " with John Gregson and Herbert Lom — a vice expose . 
Horror plus science fiction are scheduled with " The Children of Light " ( uncast ) and the film of the TV success " Quatermass and the Pit , " which would be unthinkable without Andre Morell . 
" The Phantom of the Opera " ( once Lon Chaney 's triumph ) will also be remade over here — the third edition , I think . 
Back to comedies — Leslie Phillips , James Robertson Justice and Eric Sykes combine with " Very Important Person " ; Jimmy Edwards will give us " Nearly a Nasty Accident " ; Ian Carmichael and Janette Scott co-star in " Double Bunk , " and Terry-Thomas will be with Janette for " His and Hers . " 
HEART-THROB 
There is much prophecy that the new heart-throb of the year will be Warren Beatty , over here to star with Vivien Leigh in a sordid drama called " The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone . " 
Warren is engaged to Joan Collins . 
Another American here is Susan Strasberg , to co-star with Ronald Lewis and Ann Todd in a thriller , "Taste of Fear . " 
British George Sanders stays on to co-star with Peter Cushing in " Time of the Fire . " 
To end with another contrast , we shall have Max Bygraves in a serious film about slum school life , " Spare the Rod , " and Virginia McKenna returning to the screen for a tense drama set in Sweden — " Two Living , One Dead , " in which she will co-star with husband Bill Travers . 
This is D-Day — in four different versions 
NO one seems to know if we are going to have two major films about D-Day or not . 
Certainly Howarth 's book " Dawn of D-Day " has been purchased for filming . 
But Darryl Zanuck is first with details about his " Longest Day , " by Cornelius Ryan . 
He will start production on June 6 on the original Omaha beach , Normandy , on sequences to cost as much as an average minor epic . 
The story is in four parts , each with its own director , telling the same story from the British , American , French and German points of view . 
I would like Monty 's view of Zanuck 's statement : " The theme will be the stupidity of war . 
The Allies made every conceivable physical mistake but , fortunately for us , the Germans made more . 
Unbelievable blunders on both sides took place . " 
How the Americans love to debunk ! 
A PITY this country has n't anything comparable with the Hollywood Motion Picture Museum . 
A big new building is now planned to house nearly two million pounds worth of equipment dating to the pioneer days . 
It will be built opposite the Hollywood Bowl ( famous arena and scene of spectacles , music and pageantry ) and the American film industry is to lay out £350,000 on exhibits and £180,000 on equipping sound stages for demonstrations of film production . 
VERSATILE JOE by JOHN GORDON 
JOE BROWN , former white-haired comedian of the ITV beat show " Wham , " has really hit a gusher . 
Just before starting out on a tour of one-nighters — in West Bromwich this week — he recorded two numbers , " Shine " and " The Switch " ( Pye 7N15322 ) . 
On the top half he chants away happily ; the backer is purely instrumental . 
This splendid disc proves Joe 's versatility , which is going to make him a top star this year — you 'll see . 
Bill Bramwell 's " Candid Camera Theme " ( Decca F11309 ) is a most unusual combination of guitar , piccolo and gimmick vocal . 
The other half , " Frederika , " brings a more orthodox musical combination into the picture with this slow , almost haunting , bluesy piece . 
Two good sides . 
FILM PAGE by F. Leslie Winters The man with a bent halo BUT THE LIFE , LOVES AND MUSIC OF FRANZ LISZT ADD UP TO A CINEMATIC TREAT 
THEY say ( and I do n't quite know who " they " are ) that audiences wo n't accept so eagerly these days the sort of films which were tremendously successful about 15 to 20 years ago . 
I have heard film executives express doubts whether a " Seventh Veil " type of theme would capture people 's fancy today in the extraordinary way it once did . 
Many of you will have a warm regard for that immensely popular " Song to Remember , " in which Cornel Wilde played Chopin — made in wartime and which captured people 's hearts as well as ears . 
SHUNNED ? 
Can this sort of success be repeated in these times ? 
Or does a mixture of costume , classical music and courtly manner seem likely to be shunned by audiences said to be horror and crime addicts ? 
I should be sorry to think so , for " Song Without End , " which tells some of the story of Franz Liszt , is a film worth going to for its music , its decor , its acting , and its elegance . 
Those classical composers of the great musical era are certainties for the script-writers . 
Their private lives , mainly , were as wildly romantic and as full of drama as any novelist 's inventions . 
Even so , there is usually a tendency to soften the outlines , polish up the bent haloes , and omit a few facts . 
On the whole , " Song Without End " is fairly accurate . 
It is marred by a few American accents and expressions , and is reticent about Liszt 's long affair with a Russian princess . 
Despite the detail into which this part of the film goes , it does n't even whisper the fact that they lived together for many years in a strange atmosphere of passion , piety and regret . 
But jarring moments are remarkably few in the two hours and ten minutes it takes to cover Liszt 's career from the age of 26 until he went into a monastery . 
The film 's inference at the end is that the composer has found peace and will never emerge again . 
In fact , he merely took a minor order and toured Europe as a white-haired and pretty gay old man . 
The picture also merely includes two women in his life ( from the many who caught his eye ) — French Countess Marie , with whom he ran off to Chamonix and whom he deserts to start another concert tour , simultaneously with one roving eye on Russian Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein . 
She has a jealous husband and the protection of the Czar — formidable adversaries . 
FRUSTRATION 
The personal side of the story shows the frustration and bitterness of the discarded mistress , a beautiful piece of acting from France 's Genevieve Page , and the passion-battling-religion of the entranced princess , played with the face of Ava Gardner and the coolness of a real princess by Capucine , lovely model with no acting experience before this . 
The musical side ranges from Chopin to Wagner , Beethoven to Bach , Handel , Mendelssohn , Verdi , and Schumann . 
All this played by Jorge Bolet , but magnificently co-ordinated with the hands of Dirk Bogarde , who makes of Liszt an irresponsible but rather lovable puppy-dog rather than a dare-devil , philandering genius . 
I do so hope that the pattern of entertainment has not changed so much that a worthy film of this type fails . 
Perhaps we shall be surprised and Birmingham 's Odeon will be packed this week . 
It deserves to be . 
An experiment in the shadows 
IT is strange that a Hollywood actor should get the idea for a film in a New York students ' loft on January 14 , 1957 , and a few months later , with money borrowed and money donated after a TV interview , make this film in the streets of that city and then fail to find anyone in the United States who would show it . 
That is why John Cassavetes came to England to find someone who would take a risk on something new . 
It was the directors of newly-constructed British Lion , who have got faith in fresh faces , talent , ideas and letting people try them out , who saw " Shadows " one evening and immediately offered Cassavetes the money for world distribution rights . 
I feel sure they wo n't regret it , from the prestige or financial angles . 
This film , now at the Futurist , Birmingham , was made with a 16mm camera in 42 days and nights in New York marquees , in disguised dust-bins , from trucks , in subway entrances and restaurant windows . 
For six weeks the actors , all unknown to the general public , lived together and discussed the story outline . 
Each fully understood the situations planned and the nature of the characters ( which bear the same names as the actors ) , and when the camera started they just talked — without a script , as the words came in their minds or were provoked by others . 
The result , if not completely satisfying ( some scenes do appear a little contrived and tentatively scripted ) , is remarkable . 
There is a coloured girl who pretends to sophistication but is horrified at her seduction ; her trumpet-playing brother who finally stops his aimless existence after a slum beat-up ; the clash and inner concern of the colour problem . 
No one is very good or very bad . 
It may not be a film for everyone , but it is an experiment that almost comes off and is , undoubtedly , of importance in the technique of film-making . 
TV TOPICS by ROBBIE ASHLEY Secrets of the " Candid Camera " 
SO often have I heard suggestions that " Candid Camera " is " rigged " that I decided to find out just how they go about eavesdropping on the public . 
An ABC spokesman was quite adamant in refuting the charge of " rigging " of sequences and employing actors in the role of Mr. and Mrs. Public . 
The only professionals employed on the show are Jonathan Routh ( its originator ) and sometimes Bill Bramwell ( the musical director ) . 
Obviously they are required to " set up " the victim . 
HIDDEN 
Cameras , in soundproof cabinets , are hidden behind curtains , in cupboards with the rear door left ajar ; and for street scenes the camera often shoots through the windows of a plain van parked nearby . 
Tiny radio microphones are dotted all over the place — Routh often wears a lapel microphone which only a person in the know could detect . 
An aerial runs down the trouser leg from the radio microphone , and the speech is picked up by a receiving aerial in the next room , under the counter , or just around the corner — wherever the scene is set . 
SEQUENCES 
Several sequences are shot in one day . 
For instance , in a hardware shop Routh asked a woman to fill in a form to obtain a licence to buy saucepan patches . 
Later , still in the same shop , he began selling left-handed teacups to a gullible public . 
Thousands of feet of film are shot every week , and a tremendous amount is wasted . 
Sometimes a stunt does not come off ; sometimes Routh is recognised ; and often nothing at all happens .