LACKWOOD gets
everything he has to say in _The Starlight Express_ safely across the
footlights--those fateful barriers that trap so many excellent
intentions. But he so evidently _has_ something to say, and the saying
is so gallantly attempted, that he must emphatically be credited with
something done--something rather well done really. The little play has
beautiful moments--and that is to say a great deal.

This novelist turned playwright wishes to make you see that "the Earth's
forgotten it's a Star." In plainer words he wants to present you with a
cure for "wumbledness." People who look at the black side of things, who
think chiefly of themselves--these are the wumbled. The cure is
star-dust--which is sympathy. The treatment was discovered by the
children of a poor author in a cheap Swiss _pension_ and by
"Cousinenry," a successful business man of a quite unusual sort. You
have to get out into the cave where the starlight is stored, gather
it--with the help of the Organ Grinder, who loves all children and sings
his cheery way to the stars; and the Gardener, who makes good things
grow and plucks up all weeds; and the Lamplighter, who lights up heads
and hearts and stars impartially; and the Sweep, who sweeps away all
blacks and blues over the edge of the world, and the Dustman, with his
sack of Dream-dust that is Star-dust (or isn't it?), and so forth. Then
you sprinkle the precious stuff on people, and they become miracles of
content and unselfishness. (The fact that life isn't in the very least
like that is a thing you have just got to make yourself forget for three
hours or so.)

The author was well served by his associates. Sir EDWARD ELGAR wove a
delightfully patterned music of mysterious import through the queer
tangle of the scenes and gave us an atmosphere loaded with the finest
star-dust. Lighting and setting were admirably contrived; and the
grouping of the little prologue scenes, where that kindly handsome giant
of an organ-grinder (Mr. CHARLES MOTT), with the superbly cut corduroys,
sang so tunefully to as sweet a flock of little maids as one could wish
to see, was particularly effective.

Of the players I would especially commend the delicately sensitive
performance of Miss MERCIA CAMERON (a name and talent quite new to me)
as _Jane Anne_, the chief opponent of wumbledom. She was, I think,
responsible more than any other for getting some of the mystery of the
authentic Black-woodcraft across to the aud