Nights at the Play Author:Henry Mackinnon Walbrook Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: "FANNY'S FIRST PLAY" The Little Theatre, April igth, 1911. Gentlemen, off with your hats! A great thing has happened. In three delightful hours the Cour... more »t Theatre of 1904-7 has come back to us, with all the laughter and magic of the old days. Regrets have been poured forth in bucketfuls over the collapse of that memorable enterprise. Well, here it is again, with many of the familiar faces and voices, all the former finished art, and the Master-spirit of the movement, Mr. Bernard Shaw, with one of the most amusing plays he has ever written, one of the wittiest and most audacious of all his attacks on " the mean things which men have to do to keep up their respectability." The piece is called " Fanny's First Play," and the scene of its production yesterday afternoon was the Little Theatre. It was received with the heartiest laughter and applause so far heard beneath the roof of the John Street play-house ; and the curtain finally fell amid a storm of delighted cheering. The story and the meaning of Mr. Shaw's play are difficult to compress into a few lines, but wemust make the attempt. Count O'Dowda, an elderly Irish aristocrat, with eighteenth-century ideas and ideals, has a daughter, Fanny, who has been to Girton, and has written a play, which her father is allowing her to produce at their country- house ; and at her request he has invited the critics of four of the London daily papers to come down and see it. He—good, easy man !—is assuming that it will prove an idyll of the eighteenth century, all grace, culture, and repose —a sort of dainty Harlequin-and-Columbine comedy, tempore Louis XV, as painted by Watteau. But, alas! Girton has shaken the young lady out of any eighteenth-centuryism she may have inherited. Unknown to her father, she has not only become a Suffrag...« less