In The Druid's Rest by Emlyn Williams, there is a lively dramatic idea, which perhaps could only be worked out in a Celtic setting and realized by a Welsh cast. The imagination of a youth, always moving faster than fact, brings about such an acceleration of gear in the minds of a small household in an inn-parlor that the wildest nonsense appears to be fact. Circumstantial evidence builds up into a melodrama and resolves into a comedy, perhaps commonplace in the ease with which it makes its audience laugh but otherwise well balanced and conceived. This is not a Playboy as it might have been on another imaginative plane, but it gains authenticity from the figure of the youth … who breathes life as surely as the figure of a tramp breathes the property-room. (p. 342)

Ashley Dukes, "A New Hamlet: The London Scene," in Theatre Arts (© 1944 by Theatre Publications...