The Infallible Lunts

Outwardly there was little splash or glitter--few limousines or evening clothes, and a wartime, 6:30 curtain. But tickets were priced above rubies, the lobbies were a mass of craning necks and exploding flash bulbs. Last week Alfred Lunt & Lynn Fontanne gave London one of its biggest first nights since the war began.

Because they usually bring American plays to Britain, the Lunts this time chose an English comedy: Terence Rattigan's Love in Idleness. It proved a far better good-will offering than play.

Playwright Rattigan (French without Tears, While the Sun Shines) has spun out a commonplace, lifeless comedy about a poor but charming widow who becomes the mistress of a Cabinet minister. Life is gay and she is happy until her priggish Left-Wing young son returns from Canada and is outraged to find his mother living in luxurious sin. He forces her back into virtuous drabness--but not for too long.

The play challenges every ounce of the Lunts' skill, but they manage some wonderfully adept pantomime and somehow turn a good many feeble gags into full-blooded laughs. Headlining its review "The Infallible Lunts," the Daily Telegraph & Morning Post was sure that, thanks to their acting, the play would run "as long as they like."

Another event in London's theatrical week was the second birthday of Arsenic and Old Lace, which Producer Firth Shephard celebrated by repeating his first-night trick: at the final curtain, a slew of London's topnotch comedians (Jack Buchanan, Will Hay, et al.) file onstage to impersonate the "corpses" who had been elderberried in the cellar.

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