The Wind and the Rain (by Merton Hodge; George Kondolf and Walter Hart, producers), is an investigation of quiet happenings among a group of Edinburgh medical students. Totally dissimilar to the U. S. collegians in She Loves Me Not or the hospital internes of Men in White, the students in The Wind and the Rain use such words as "mucky," "dirty little snurge" and "poops to you" but toward the fundamental problems of their academic life their attitude is dignified and serious. Charles Tritton (Frank Lawton) is a hypersensitive undergraduate, devoted to his mother who runs an antique shop in London and eager to please her by marrying his childhood sweetheart. When he falls in love with a lovely sculptress (Rose Hobart) whose studio is around the corner from Mrs. McFie's Edinburgh boarding house, he feels less satisfied than frightened. Without any uproar The Wind and the Rain shows how he overcomes his tremors over the space of five years. By that time, his friends are doctors. His mother is dead. He has broken with his fiancee. The sculptress, who has been his mistress, expects to be his wife. A new boy is moving into Tritton's room, with a suitcase full of bones and Gray's Anatomy.
British plays about college life, for which Young Woodley is still the best prototype, are as unlike their U. S. counterparts as the characters in them. Nothing happens in the first two acts of The Wind and the Rain. The climax of the third arrives when Tritton passes his examinations. What gives the play its warmth and charm is the reticent natural ness in Merton Hodge's writing, the good acting of Mildred Natwick, Rose Hobart and Frank Lawton.
Theodora, The Quean* (By Jo Milward and J. Kerby Hawkes; Jo Graham, producer) is a tedious transplantation of Pierre Louys' famed courtesan Aphrodite from pagan Alexandria to Byzantium of the 6th Century, as thoroughly papier-mache as the hollow helmets deposited on Theodora's dressing-table. She (Elena Miramova), aided & abetted by her mother in the practice of love ("I'm neither hot nor cold but proficient"), is run after by all the city's young bloods who address her as "Theodora of the Circus." Drunk with power, she publicly mocks the empress, is thrown into a dungeon, rescued by the disdainful Regent (Minor Watson) with whom she falls in love. She wants to be his wife but he, a onetime goat-herder, will have her only for occasional recreation. The emperor dies (offstage). A coup d'etat plumps a pretender on the throne (offstage). To save the Regent by ridiculing him, Theodora regales the circus mob with an account of his private conduct (offstage). Humiliated and expecting death, he forces Theodora to marry him. When another coup d'etat destroys the pretender the Regent becomes Emperor and the quean becomes a queen.