A Friend informed me after night's performance of "Yes M'Lord" that the play was humorless and dull. Therefore I enter the reservation that those who aren't addicted to English drawing room comedies won't like this one. The rest of this review is solely for those fortunate few who are.

There is one important feature that distinguishes this production from most other comedies. It has A. E. Matthews. This man is a magnificent bumbler. His bumbling is troublesome in the first act, stimulating in the second, and ingratiating in the third. The eighty-year old actor, portraying a somewhat senile carl who is concerned mainly with shooting marauding rabbits, quietly dominates the action. His bumbling is perfected, the slope of his back is eloquent, and his sage unconcern with mundane matters cannot become tiresome. Aside from his unfortunate tendency to esh his esses, Matthews distributes his lines with the precision of a younger man.

The plot, and the form of the drawing room comedy demands a plot, dabbles in polities. But it is generally frothy, and could be revised or dropped without much ill effect.

George Curzon is a butler, and he buttles as English, theater butlers have buttled for years. This small group of highly specialized performers has its system codified, and the butler's actions under any circumstances can be predicted very accurately. But if the circumstances are eleverly contrived, and in this case they are, the butler is a valuable man man to have on the stage.

In drawing room comedies, there is always one minor character who is extremely annoying. Usually it is and American, who is supplied with a pile of Yankee idiom and a vicious accent and who distributes these to the audience with magnanimity. But "Yes M'Lord" 's American is a girl and relatively well behaved, and Elaine Stritch brings enough, restraint to the role to excuse her occasional moralizing. She is part of a generally excellent cast.