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Wings Over Europe. "Up and atom," the scientists cry and in this play with its vaguely beautiful title Poet Robert Nichols and Stage-technician Maurice Browne have imagined a youthful researcher, the nephew of a Prime Minister, to have discovered how to control the tiny secret stars that whirl in thumbnail welkins. Perhaps the most encouraging trait of humanity is the ingenuity which it exhibits in making such discoveries; and perhaps the most discouraging trait in humanity is the lack of ingenuity which it exhibits in making use of them. The young atomist, accordingly, tells the British Cabinet about his findings, and its members, absolutely unable to think of anything to do about it, offer to put him in jail.
The young man, however, by knowing the secret of the atom, appears to have gained the ability to destroy the entire world at a moment's notice. After two acts of argument, this is the necessity with which he is faced, and the Cabinet sits, engaged in nervous little pastimes, waiting for doom, while a clock ticks and the audience remembers happily that it is all a play. Then one member of the Cabinet gets the bright idea of murdering the scientist.
In pointing their sad morals, the authors have found it unnecessary to call any women to their aid; there are none in the cast and Helen Westley, the charming war-horse of the Theatre Guild, is therefore not called upon to add Wings Over Europe to Major Barbara and Strange Interlude, her present assignments. The male actors are uniformly as good as Guild casts should be, acting the preposterous caricatures of the Cabinet members. Alexander Kirkland is Lightfoot, the worker of wonders.
Though Wings Over Europe, by virtue of its lack of sex-appeal and the Wells-Vernian circumstances of its conversational plot, is a freak play, it is also of the kind called "profound." This means that its excitements are cerebral and that spectators, leaving the theatre in their cabs, will be aroused to the point of shouting each other down with explanations of its meanings and with speculations as to what each one would have done, had he or she been the luckless Lightfoot.
Sign of the Leopard. "I cannot disturb Mr. Wallace—he has just started a new play." With these words, the secretary of Edgar Wallace endeavored to discourage a telephonic caller who immediately replied, "Very well—I will hold the wire until he finishes it." Such is the reputation for alacrity in composition of the playwright-novelist-journalist who keeps London and England in a perpetual state of horror at his inventions. In the U. S., his horrid fancies occasion less alarm. In this, what with switching backward and forward, after the fashion cf the cinema, in time sequence, and supplying comparatively comic snitches here and there, Author Wallace's sprig of grue was sufficiently funny, novel and grisly to provoke the intended reactions among Manhattan susceptibles. In it, moreover, Nina Gore, daughter of blind onetime (1907-12) U. S. Senator from Oklahoma Thomas Pryor Gore, made a one-line stage debut; Flora Sheffield exhibited a girlish physique as the heroine and Campbell Gullan, with a tykish burr, played the newspaper sleuth.