Razzle Dazzle

Examiner of Plays' Summary:

This is a revue on a very large spectacular scale, including as it does a patriotic admiralty scene, a sylvan ballet, a Niagara episode, and some skating on real ice in Switzerland. For the rest there is some chaff about the engagement of a Beauty Chorus, about the reading of a play by an author suffering from many interruptions, and about a society prize fight for very gentlemanly pugilists. There is a farce illustrating the troubles of an inventor though the success of his new adhesive ‘stickittite’ and there are others dealing with fraudulent forte-telling by cards, with the auctioneering of a cheap jack, and with the humours of ill-natured chatter at a noisy ‘first-night’ in a theatre erected bodily on the stage. The one dramatic feature is a trifle which begins as a Grand Guignol thriller, and ends as a sell. A husband who is a professional illusionist, and suspects his friend and wife of too great intimacy, persuades them to help him in one of his tricks by lying each handcuffed, side by side outside the bed, whereupon with a chuckle of maniacal revenge he causes the canopy to descend and apparently smother the guilty pair when the horror comes to its climax the victims sit up on their death-bed laughing, while the cinema operator is called in to take the picture for the film. Recommended for license, Ernest A. Bendall.