The Mixture as Before

London had got two new Noel Coward plays last week, with Coward starring in both of them. If the audiences hoped for something with the drama of Coward's cinema tribute to the Royal Navy, In Which We Serve (TIME, Dec. 28), they were disappointed. Present Laughter is another of Coward's smooth, neatly frappeed cocktails, and This Happy Breed is a wholesome and slightly doughy shepherd's pie.

Present Laughter spins with the dalliances and divorces of a group of theater folk. They, like the play, are dominated by Garry Essendine (Coward), a charming, exhibitionistic, highly temperamental actor first glimpsed in a flame-colored dressing gown and lemon-yellow pajamas.

The play -- with its repeated slamming of bedroom doors -- guys bedroom farce, and a very plain, very sane woman secretary points up the looniness of the artistic temperament.

This Happy Breed, a cavalcade of lower middle class life in a London suburb between two wars, is an attempted salute to the common man. Extending from 1919 to 1939, it tells the sometimes drab story of the durable Gibbons family, their births, marriages, deaths, their small joys and fair-sized sorrows. Rich in accurate observation, and at moments funny, it is lean on drama and lacking in depth. No British Chekhov or even Odets, Coward has the wish to be a serious dramatist without the wherewithal. A born sophisticate, he is at ease on figure skates, but slightly awkward in the average man's shoes.

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