New Plays in Manhattan

The Old Rascal. The spectacle of Mr. William Hodge in a bedroom farce will come as a great surprise to his enthusiastic admirers. Long have they been used to seeing him in dramas which rigidly observed, if indeed they did not extol, the principles of virtuous conduct. Now he appears as a chin-whiskered but frisky California lawyer who arrives in Manhattan bent on giving his wife grounds 'for divorce (among other things, she demolished his excellent wine cellar). His method involves a hotel room and a hired trollop, with whom he retires in full view of the audience. The farcical exploits of a crew of blackmailers nearly cause things to go askew, but Mr. Hodge at length avoids the dilemmas which, as playwright, he has devised for himself. That portion of the Hodge public which enjoys rather obvious double-meanings and bedchamber goings-on will have a good time.

Dear Old England. A group of English aristocrats impoverished by the War and living in abandoned tramcars on the Sussex Downs, like dispossessed peacocks trying to thrive in old packing boxes on an empty lot, would be sufficient suggestion for almost any kind of play one might want to write. Henry Francis Maltby found fun in the predicament of these elegants; he wrote a comedy about them which, whether or not they ever existed, greatly amused London, is now on view in Manhattan.

At varying times it is sentimental, heavily, socially satirical, slapstick. But despite the romances and lampoons and picturesqueness, it is the reliable spirit of low comedy which prevails. There is a comical, hungry goat, and there is Mr. Reginald Carrington as a lovable old Lord who can scarcely move without veering into some of the precarious makeshift furniture, thereby causing its collaspse. Whenever the tempo lags or the substance thins, some such violent commotion as Mr. Carrington's table-toppling is almost bound to provoke a horselaugh.

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