It all depends what you want when you go to the theatre. The Pulitzer Prize will probably never descend upon the benign person of Mr. George M. Cohan; on the other hand Mr. Eugene O'Neill, whose forbears must hall from a very different part of Ireland, will probably never write as good an evening's entertainment as Mr. Cohan manages to turn out with annual regularity. His plays are never profound, never very original; with a fair amount of practice one can almost invariably guess what is going to happen next. But the point is that one doesn't mind, one rather likes it, in fact.

In his current play, Mr. Cohan has gone mildly detective. Two young couples in New York spend much of their time together; but Mrs. Burgess and Mr. Loftus spend even more of their time together without telling their respective husband and wife anything about it. Mr. Loftus, finding two homes more expensive than one, steals his wife's jewelry to pay the bills. Mrs. Loftus calls in a detective to find the jewelry and he goes right on to find the secret love nest. One rather suspects he knew about it even before the play started, because he's the kind of detective that does known everything and, besides, he is acted by the author himself. He persuades the cuckolded pair to "play it my way" and succeeds in getting the goods on the sinners after innumerable complications. And in the end, in his same omnipotent way, he gets signed confessions, steamship passages, gems, --sorts them out to the various principals, and leaves the world a happier and better place to live in.

Mr. Cohan as the detective is his own inimitable self. For this reviewer, who first saw Mr. Cohan in "Little Nelly Kelly" when he was still singing and dancing. Mr. Cohan remains one of the best actors in the country. There is a quiet finesse to his every action. He always has his audiences in the palm of his hand, and he knows just how to keep it there. The result is a spontanaeity that leads one to believe that he is making up his lines as he goes along--as he doubtless is, sometimes. His gestures, especially a "safe-at-home" motion and a raised forefinger, say even more than his lines.

Under Mr. Cohan's direction the rest of the company is uniformly good. The staging of the play is as obvious as the writing. But it is always dramatic, is always good "theatre." It is just that sense of the theatre that distinguishes alike the writing, the acting, and the production of "In Confidential Service." And it is just that sense of the theatre that makes this play, as all of Mr. Cohan's plays, so thoroughly enjoyable.