If Mr. Jones had shown as much tact in the construction of his play as in the selection of his cast, how admirable the play would have been!  I have rarely seen a play in which each actor seemed to fit into his part with such exactitude.  But the play!  Well, the play began as a comedy, continued as a tragedy, and ended as a farce.  It came to a crisis every five minutes, it suggested splendid situations, and then caricatured them unintentionally, it went shilly-shallying about among the emotions and sensations which may be drama or melodrama, whichever the handling makes them.  “You see there is a little poetical justice going about the world,” says the Princess, when she hears that her rival, against whom she has fought in vain, has been upset by Providence in the form of a motor-car, and the bridge of her nose broken.  The broken nose is Mr. Jones’s symbol for poetical justice; it indicates his intellectual attitude.  There are many parts of the play where he shows, as he has so often shown, a genuine skill in presenting and manipulating humorous minor characters.  As usual, they have little to do with the play, but they are amusing for their moment.  It is the serious characters who will not be serious.  They are meant well, the action hovers about them with little tempting solicitations, continually offering them an opportunity to be fine, to be genuine, and then withdrawing it before it can be grasped.  The third act has all the material of tragedy, but the material is wasted; only the actress makes anything of it.  We know how Sullivan will take a motive of mere farce, such words as the “O Captain Shaw!” of “Iolanthe,” and will write a lovely melody to go with it, fitting his music to the feeling which the words do but caricature.  That is how Miss Irene Vanbrugh handled Mr. Jones’s unshapen material.  By the earnestness, sincerity, sheer nature, power, fire, dignity, and gaiety of her acting, she made for us a figure which Mr. Jones had not made.  Mr. Jones would set his character in some impossible situation, and Miss Vanbrugh would make us, for the moment, forget its impossibility.  He would give her a trivial or a grotesque or a vulgar action to do, and she would do it with distinction.  She had force in lightness, a vivid malice, a magnetic cheerfulness; and she could suffer silently, and be sincere in a tragedy which had been conceived without sincerity.  If acting could save a play, “The Princess’s Nose” would have been saved.  It was not saved.

And the reason is that even the best of actors cannot save a play which insists on defeating them at every turn.  Yet, as we may realise any day when Sarah Bernhardt acts before us, there is a certain kind of frankly melodramatic play which can be lifted into at all events a region of excited and gratified nerves.  I have lately been to see a melodrama called “The Heel of Achilles,” which Miss Julia Neilson has been giving at the Globe Theatre.  The play was meant to tear at one’s susceptibilities, much