hollow that I doubt if very much is to be made of it. What Mr Woods and Mr Miller really need to carry off their investment in such magnificent costumes and in a set for an eighteenth century inn at Geneva which looks like the Japanese Room at the Ritz is a new play about Casanova.—And finally, I would commend the French screen version of Anatole France's Crainquebille—the best film I have ever seen, which almost shook my faith in the impossibility of the movie as a medium for dramatic art.
The Lullaby is a new play by Mr Edward Knoblock. Mr Knoblock is, I am told, one of the three men in the English-speaking world who knows most about the theatre. He is a master of dramatic technique and has an unerring sense of the stage; he is an encyclopaedia of all the plots and situations of the last fifty years. The result is that, in The Lullaby, you know the end of almost every one of Mr Knoblock's dozen or so scenes as soon as you have seen the beginning and that you find your lips automatically pronouncing with the actor the words of Mr Knoblock's speeches as soon as you have heard the first phrase. Yet I would rather see The Lullaby than The Children of the Moon, which is, I think, the most tedious play, bar none, I have ever sat completely through. The author has evidently tried to do something in the closely fitted, slightly symbolic later manner of Ibsen and the result is that he has reproduced the technique without either the poetry, the insight into character or the genius for dramatic effect. You sit there and watch the old Ibsen machine grinding along to its relentless close—but unfortunately there is no excitement in watching the wheels go 'round because it is evident that nothing is going to happen which you did not know about in the first place.
The Italian Marionettes at the Frolic are the best I have ever seen. They are better than Tony Sarg's because they are less realistic. Tony Sarg followed the great modern fallacy and tried to make his puppets reproduce life—in one of his plays, I remember, he had a dog which might almost have been mistaken for a real dog. But the Italian marionettes are conventionalized and grotesque—what is the use of making artificial men if they are going to be exactly like real men? The Italian ones still have some of the naïve charm of the pre-realistic world. And their performance,
