The jubilee of Irene Vanbrugh's first appearance on the London stage (in the tiny part of Phoebe, a shepherdes, in "As You Like It" in 1888) is to be celebrated by a matinee at His Majesty's Theatre on Monday, at which the Queen will be present and every well known actor and actress, except those who are on tour, will take part. Among them one sees such names as Julia Neilson, Ellaline Terris, Edna May, Adeline Genée, Ben Webster, Harcourt. So popular is Irene Vanbrugh that many actors and actresses of distinction are content merely to walk on and speak a couple of lines in order to take part in the tribute to her.
The programme as far as her share in it goes, contains Act I of A. A. f Milne's great success "Belinda," and the great Act III from "The Gay Lord Quex," in which Irene Vanbrugh really made her name, although she had already scored strongly in the title rôle of another Pinero play, "Trelawney of the Wells."
Irene Vanbrugh was always porkling actress, a vivid personality, ippant on her feet," swift but per: fectly audible in speech, She was unsurpassed in comedy of the Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones type, but she could also show a deeper strain of sentiment as in "His House in Order." Since those plays the theatre has worked through a variety of changes—notably the awful naturalist tic phase when actors turned their backs on the audience and muttered inaudibly to each other in order to be as un theatre-like as possible—and modern comedies have not the neatly rounded off form of those of the past. But whenever Irene Vanbrugh takes part in one, her acting still shows the polish, distinction and magnetism that marked her out in pre-war days.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.