The latest specimen of what may be called the "scare play" until someone invents a better generic term, of which the Grand Guignol Theatre has made a speciality, 1s based on a short story by Dickens and is called "Une Soiree a Londres." A mysterious woman in black calls on a doctor at night and urges him to come to her house next morning, but not before. He consents with some misgiving, and finds his patient, a young man. dead. The body, which is on a bed at the hack of the stage, bea-s marks of strangulation, and the doctor discovers that the dead man is a murderer who has just been hanged. The woman, his mother, half mad with grief, had called in the doctor in the hope that he would be able to revive her boy. This story, told by M. Gustave Fréjaville, who is more of a poet than a dramatist with an eye to violent effects, is pathetic rather than horrible and is not so highly \gnicad as a Grand Guignol habitue could wish. 4 There is no doubt that terror, when unaccompanied by personal danger, is a pleasurable and stimulating intellectual sensation, mosphere of probability in sur-laundings of every-day life. For real enjoyment, the spectator must let himself go to a_ certain extent but not altogether. He needs 2a mental duplication which calls for practice; but the inevitable drawback of course that, like the body, the mind reacts less and less against the continued use of a stimulant, and it therefore becomes more and mo-o difficult to inspire the spectator with just that amount of terror which is necessary to make him feel that he has spent a pleasant evening.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.