Romance in London

Last week all London was still fighting for tickets to the U.S. musical Oklahoma! But for a simple-minded evening in the theater, the British public preferred an outrageously sentimental, swashbuckling melodrama-with-music called Perchance to Dream. It celebrated its thousandth performance by packing the Hippodrome to the rafters with sniffling, wildly applauding spectators.

As a play, Perchance to Dream lies somewhere between East Lynn, and The Prisoner of Zenda. To the accompaniment of sobbing violins, it follows three generations of hand-kissing, heel-clicking adventurers and three generations of innocent but susceptible young women.

The man who plays it to a fare-thee-well is England's durable matinee idol, 54-year-old Ivor Novello. A kind of poor woman's Noel Coward, Novello also wrote the play and composed its half dozen hit songs. As playwright, he instinctively senses the emotional desires of a woolgathering audience. As composer, he sets his public's daydreams to soft, sugary music. As actor he hams it for all it is worth.

The years have been kind to the famed Novello profile and his eyes still flash the same old exciting theatrical fire. His fans never seem to tire of his shameless romanticism. "I suppose," Novello once remarked, "it has given them some focus in life."

Novello is the author of 22 plays (of which only two have been flops). His triumphant Dancing Years is still moving blithely from province to province after a marathon run of eight years. He played his first stage role in 1921, partly because his family disapproved, and wrote his first play in 1924 with Constance Collier. His songwriting career began even earlier. During World War I his mother, a well-known English music teacher, announced her intention of composing a patriotic song. "She did," explains Novello brightly, "and it was perfectly ghastly. So I wrote one myself." It was Keep the Home Fires Burning.

Novello's life has revolved entirely around the theater. He has played in British movies as recently as 1937 and in a few early Hollywood silents. But "I loathe making films," he says. "It's entirely against nature to get up at 7 o'clock in the morning and put on evening dress."

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