The main difficulty with dramatizing a popular novel of the type of "The Masquerader" is that your audience knows your secret before the curtain rises. Moreover, in the case of "The Masquerader" it is scarcely necessary to have read the book to know how the play will end. So if you are a young playwright like Mr. John Hunter Booth, the only thing that will save so innocent and helpless an offspring is dialogue, atmosphere, distinction, what you will. Mr. Booth's solution is evidently anticlimax. There is one end at the end of Act 2; another at the beginning of Act 3. The rest is easy.

This is the more surprising in Mr. Booth, since he had the advantage, at outset, of a good, workmanlike novel to draw upon. It is not a sin against art to write a romance or construct a play upon the impossible physical resemblance of two men. Only you must get away with it. A certain William Shakespeare, as Professor Baker would say, "got away with it," to a remarkable degree in "Twelfth Night," and so did Anthony Hope in that classic melodrama, "The Prisoner of Zenda." And so did Mrs. Thurston, the original author of "The Masquerader." But Mr. Booth refused to concede all the honors to his feminine collaborator. So he brings the play up to date, adds some rather hollow gabble about munitions, German spies, bleeding Belgium; and by so doing, strange to say, piles impossibility upon impossibility. If you want to see how Mr. Booth's war-policy is actually more unreal than Mrs. Thurston's improbable novel built around an impossible resemblance, go to the Plymouth and find out. It is a very fair evening's entertainment.

A word as to the very adequate acting. It was a pleasure to see that calented English actor, Mr. Louis Calvert, even in the plodding role of the eternal English butler. Miss Haidee Wright's beautiful voice was heard in the dubious part of Eve Chilcote. With the exception of the stars, it is the only part in the play which affords the slightest chance of human characterization. Mr. Handy sides and Mr. Robertson hardly succeed in conveying a proper illusion as English statesmen. Mr. Guy Bates Post in the leading role was always interesting and sometimes admirable. At the end of anticlimax No. 1, Mr. Tully, the producer, announced somewhat unnecessarily "that Mr. Post would be soon seen again in these parts in 'Hamlet'--or something worth while." We fear he was just being witty. But Mr. Post would be adequate in anything.