The choice of the Alfieri Theatre for the scene of the culmination of the domestic drama seemed to touch the extreme of improbability.  The actors were not a poor travelling company of mummers, as in Pagliacci, with no decent private accommodation for this kind of thing.  The protagonist of Carnival was lodged in a perfectly good Venetian palace, where there was every convenience for having the matter out with his wife and her lover.  For the rest the plot was commonplace to the verge of banality.

As Silvio Steno, in his home life, Mr. MATHESON LANG was excellently natural, but as Othello his make-up spoilt his nice face and tended to alienate me.  As Simonetta (I got very sick of the name) Miss HILDA BAYLEY had a difficult part, and failed, from no great fault of her own, to attach our sympathies, till in the end she explained her rather inscrutable conduct in a defence which gave us for the first time a sense of sincerity in her character.  There was too much play with her Carnival dress of a Bacchante, which, perhaps, was less intriguing than we were given to understand.  Mr. DENNIS NEILSON-TERRY has a certain distinction, but he did not make a very perfect military paramour.  His intonation seemed to lack control, and he has a curious habit of baring his upper teeth when he is getting ready to make a forcible remark.

As for the scenes, they were alleged to be Venice (where the Doges wedded the sea), but there was no visible sign of water.  You called for a gondola, which always sounds better than a taxi, but it never appeared.  Perhaps, however, for one has not always been very happy in one’s experiences of stage navigation, this was just as well.

O.S.

* * * * *

“PETER IBBETSON.”

That incorrigible romanticist, GEORGE DU MAURIER of happy memory, was so transparently sincere as to be disarming.  No use telling him “life’s not like that.”  “That’s just it,” he’d say, and get on with his pleasant illusions. Peter Ibbetson is certainly not tuned to the moods of this decade, but it would be a pity if we all became too sophisticated to enjoy such occasional excursions into the land of almost-grown-up make-believe.

If life doesn’t give you what you want, then “cross your legs, put your hands behind your head,” go to sleep and live a dream-life of your own devising—­that is the theme.  The bare essentials of the story are that the beloved Mimsy of Peter’s happy childhood becomes the wife of a distinctly unfaithful duke; while Peter finds himself in prison for killing his quite gratuitously wicked uncle, and for forty years reprieved convict and deceived duchess meet in dreams till her death divides and his again unites them.

It is a considerable tribute to both author and adapter (the late JOHN RAPHAEL) that their work should, at the height of the barking season, hold an audience silent and apparently enthralled, in spite of the handicap that, in order to make the story in any degree intelligible, much time had to be given to more or less tedious explanations.