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"Aged 26" (by Anne Crawford Flexner; Richard Aldrich. producer). Robert Harris is a young British actor of engaging manner and appearance who for 30 months in London played The Wind and the Rain's male lead. That emotional medical student was not unlike the John Keats impersonated by Actor Harris in "Aged 26." His performance in this wistful wisp of a play indicates that, if dramatists insist on writing plays about romantic poets, the naive, modest, impetuous sort of charm which seems to be the peculiar distillation of certain young British actors is just what such plays need to be palatable. There are no melodramatic fireworks in "Aged 26." Mr. Harris does not indulge in agonies of poetic creation on the stage, or in windy declamations or wild rantings. He simply portrays an imaginative, otherworldly young man suffering from frustrated love and the foretaste of early death.
"Aged 26" opens in the Fleet Street reading room of Messrs. Taylor & Hessey. Flanked by his loyal publisher, Mr. Taylor (Matthew Boulton) and his devoted friend, Charles Armitage Brown (Kenneth MacKenna), Keats replies with dignity to the gibes of his foppish critics on the London quarterlies, meets Shelley and Byron, attracts their friendship instantly, encounters Fanny Brawne (Linda Watkins) for the first time. Assiduously nursing his sick brother, harassed by poverty and already failing in health himself, Keats appeals to his guardian to reconstrue his grandfather's will so that he can have his share at once instead of waiting until all four grandchildren attain their majority. The guardian refuses. After Tom dies, the poet goes to live with Brown, who picks up the odes he leaves scattered about, lays them away in a drawer. One called On a Grecian Urn is crumpled up in the coal scuttle. Fanny, who lives next door, responds to his love. During one of his coughing spells, the first spot of blood appears on the poet's handkerchief and old Dr. Sawrey orders him to Italy. A ruse engineered by Brown gets Mrs. Brawne out of the way so that John and Fanny may have one night together before he sails for the land in which he is to die six months later, aged 26.
All Editions (by Charles Washburn & Clyde North; Juliana Morgan, producer) contains an undertaker who wants to find a fearfully ugly man, ready & willing to die. on whom he can perform beautifying post-mortem surgery which will attract attention to his art. He finds a perfect specimen, an old carnival man named Rhinoceros who looks somewhat like the late Lon Chaney's Quasimodo. Rhinoceros is ill and willing to die for $500, which is to be given to the girl who has taken care of him. Rhinoceros feigns death by hypnotizing himself but escapes in time from the undertaker's operating table.
Unfortunately this grisly business has not been put into a good horror play but into what purports to be a merry farce-comedy about high-pressure pressagentry. Author Charles Washburn is a Manhattan theatrical pressagent. Producer Juliana Morgan is Mrs. Oscar W. Ehrhorn, wife of a Federal referee in bankruptcy.