Grant Mitchell is one of those actors who are perennially the same, who year in and year out, choose the same sort of ingratiating part for themselves, and when a new one fails to appear, and they find themselves faced with joblessness, set to work and revive an old one. Sometimes they make huge hits that way. More often they fail miserably. And still more often they turn out to be the kind of undistinguished, evenly flowing, slightly more than mediocre production that wended its quiet way across the proscenium of the Plymouth Theatre last night.

A tailor-made play in every respect, Grant Mitchell's revived vehicle is not unpleasant. Depending on the locality, it would be described as "an agreeable farce comedy", a "healthy" one or an "Inconsequential" one. The curtain-line is: "Isn't life a wonderful proposition after all?" That's the sort of play it is.

Notwithstanding, there are moments that aren't a bit bad, situations, that, for all their metronome-like precision of planning, get their points over in a routine and unhilarious manner. In fact, the playing is just that--routine and unhilarious. All the actors, with the possible exception of Mr. Mitchell, seem to have been deadened in years of stock work. Their character drawing is unsubtle, all darkness and brightness, with no intermediate shading.

So, for that matter is the writing--done at a period when all the important characters had "exits" in the last act, with appropriate pauses for the audience to applaud in, when every situation was suggested, built up, and reached with a mechanical inevitability--the day of the "well-made play." Fortunately, that rigidity doesn't hold these days. In a period of nine-act dramas, of comedies taking place in a character's mind, of slangy racketeer melodrama the obvious mechanisms of Harry B. Smith's farce strike one as outdated, rusty, but serviceable.