The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle

When Arsenic and Old Lace opened in London in 1942, a great many people doubted whether war-torn Britons would find murder and madness very amusing. Last week, with its 1,050th performance, Arsenic nosed out Edward Sheldon's Romance to become the longest-running U.S. play in London's history. Everybody from the Royal Family down had seen it; Mrs. Churchill had seen it twice.

Though for months Vi's were whistling all around the theater, the cast never missed a performance. "There were plenty of times when we were ready to chuck it," one young actress admitted, "but what could we do when Dame Lilian kept going on?" Dame Lilian Braithwaite, Arsenic's Abby Brewster and the English stage's Grand Old Lady, can be more frightening than bombs. A clergyman's daughter who has triumphantly passed almost 50 of her 70-odd years in the theater, she looks like anybody's sweet old grandmother. But she combines plenty of arsenic with her old lace.

When Producer Firth Shephard begged her to take Arsenic on tour to get away from the bombs, she murmured: "Where do you suggest we start, dear -- Dover?" When crusty Critic James Agate saluted her with "You are still the second most beautiful woman on the English stage," she purred: "That's quite a compliment, from the second-best critic in England." Once, leafing through an album, she came across a picture, taken ten years before, of a much younger rival actress. She studied it a moment, then sighed: "My, my, hasn't she aged."

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