The second course of Mr. Coward's current offering brings to light a program more varied in scope than the first, and presents an excellent opportunity for the author-director to display not only variations in his writing but still in handling on the stage his intricate and often most delicately balanced dialogue and situation.

The curtain-raiser is in the familiar Coward tradition of the London flat, the racy sophistication, and the intricate shadings of character. "Hands Across The Sea" Depends for plot upon simple mistaken identity; but it is into his people, not action, that Coward throws his efforts here. Basically a tour the forced for Gertrude Lawrence, the apparently flawless supporting cast is spread out in a half-dozen beautiful roles. Uneasy colonials, brash ladies, amorphic gentlemen all flow around the sparkling currents of Miss Lawrence's personality and Mr. Coward's lightest lines in a piece which is to the best degree pure entertainment.

Second on the program is "Fumed Oak," a low pitched middle-class drama which almost succeeds by contrast to the first offering only to father at the final curtain when Coward steps the action dead to allow his here to unwind the lives of the participants. Philip Tonge and Miss Lawrence play off beautifully against each other, but they are helpless in the face of the recurrent Coward tendency to be patronizing to the lower classes.

Both Coward and Miss Lawrence recover them, selves completely in the final "Shadow Play," easily the most engaging of the evening's offerings. A combination of deft music and engaging dances makes such songs as the lifting "You Were There" the strongest features of a convincing fantasy. Coward, writing for Miss Lawrence, is consistently excellent as he always is when he has his players in mind. It is unformatted that he does not play opposite her as in the original production, for although Graham Payn is a competent imitator of Coward, Coward performing Coward still seems to be the happiest arrangement all around.

The sum total of the evening is a remarkably well-balanced serving of Coward, tremendously enhanced by his expert direction. Even in the weak moments of "Fumed Oak," the element timing of action and dialogue carries the audience past the inherent failures of the work: and although the middle-class experiment fails through author's in ability to combine his overeager social consciousness with a saving fluency of dialogue, the director's fine sense of timing and contrast save the piece as a whole. Indeed, the neatly-balanced combination of Coward and Coward make the Shubert bill worth not one, but two evenings of almost anyone's time. C.W.B.