The remaining admirer, left alone in the company of the lady, ignores with a fine detachment the impotent rage that his captives are presumably venting in the passage just outside, and declares the ardour of his passion as a man might do in the breathless calm of a moonlit solitude a deux.  And on this idyllic scene the curtain descends.

[Illustration:  “PAP-PA” AND “POOSY-CAT.”

Wachner . . . . .   MR. NORMAN MCKINNEL.
Madame Wachner . .  MISS ANNIE SCHLETTER.]

The most satisfying thing in the play was the acting of Miss ANNIE SCHLETTER as “Madame” Wachner of the Chalet des Muguets, an extraordinarily clever study of the doting Hausfrau, much busied about the service of her lord.  Mr. NORMAN MCKINNEL as Wachner easily contrived to convey the typically Teuton blend of brutishness, and domestic sentimentality, combined with the heavy playfulness which by a curious delusion, ineradicably racial, is mistaken over there for humour.  “Ja, ja,” he says complacently, “I have the humour-sense.”

It was regrettable that the cosmopolitan Anna Wolsky, acted with great animation by Miss MARGARET HALSTAN, had to withdraw from the scene at an early stage in consequence of being murdered—­I don’t know how, as we neither saw nor heard the details.  Her friend, Sylvia Bailey, however, stayed on to the finish, and Miss EMILY BROOKE saw her nicely through her troubles.  A very level performance.

[Illustration:  “CHARGE, CHESTER—­CHARGE!”

Count Paul de Virieu . . .  MR. OWEN NARES.
William Chester . . . . .   MR. JOHN HOWELL.]

To the rather wooden part of William Chester (foil to hero) Mr. JOHN HOWELL brought a certain unliveliness of his own.  A better chance was taken by Miss STELLA RHO, who gave proof of a vivid personality in her brief sketch of a professional fortune-teller who admitted to her clients (this must be very unusual) that she nearly always made a mess of her crystal-gazing.

Finally, Mr. OWEN NARES, looking pretty and not too warlike in the gay uniform of a French Officer of Cavalry, played the hero’s part with a very natural and fluent charm.  I join in the general hope that this, the first play under his actor-management, will go well.  It ought to, for though, in point of power to thrill, it did not quite confirm the promise of its sinister name and theme it was never for a moment dull, and its faults were the kind of stage-faults about which, while they give the critic a chance of being unkind, a British audience never worries too much.

O.S.

* * * * *

A matinee of Romeo and Juliet will be given at the Royal Court Theatre on Sunday, March 30th, at 2.30 P.M., in aid of the Notting Hill Day Nursery, which has done such admirable service among the poor of “The Potteries.”  Help is greatly needed to enable the promoters of this good work (for which Mr. Punch has before now appealed) to pay off a mortgage and to start a fund for a convalescent cottage-home.  Among the cast of the matinee will be Miss MONA MAUGHAN, Mr. DENNIS NEILSON-TERRY and Mr. OTHO STUART, who produces it.  Tickets may be obtained from the Hon. Sec., 22, Paulton’s Square, Chelsea, S.W.