Phoenix, London

‘At the Phoenix Ronald Adam is to revive the late J. M. Barrie’s play “A Kiss for Cinderella,” at the Phoenix, on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. It will be played there for about a three-week season, and from the matinée on December 27 it will be given twice daily. Sebastian Shaw will be the Policeman and Glynis Johns, Cinderella. Other members of the cast will include Esmé Church, Elliot Makeham, J. Hubert Leslie, Bruce Winston, Richard Littledale, and Caroline Bailey. David Homan has designed the scenery. Murray Macdonald will produce the play. The last revival of this play in the West End was in 1924’. The Stage, 9 December 1937. The Times, 16 December 1937, advertised Sebastian Shaw in A Kiss for Cinderella at the Phoenix Theatre from Friday 24 December. It also reported that Glynis Johns would play Cinderella and that the play would be performed every afternoon and evening during its season of three to four weeks. ‘Barrie Fantasy. Imaginative Acting in “A Kiss for Cinderella.” From Our Own Correspondent, London, Thursday. Enjoyment of Sir James Barrie’s fantasy, “A Kiss for Cinderella,” which was attractively produced at the Phoenix Theatre to-day, is found to have been affected far more than “Peter Pan” ever could be by the passing of time. Containing references to the air raids which threatened London at the time of the play’s first production, and a slight antipathy to a German child who takes part in one scene, the fantasy is splendidly rescued from the dated piece it might have become by the sympathy of the acting and several scenes of a poignant beauty which only Barrie could have conceived. The last act rather laboriously emphasises the disappearance of class distinction through the agency of the war, but concludes with a tender love scene that shows brightly the fine poetic quality of the author’s mind. Cinderella this time is a member of a prosaic world in which policemen and pennies are more important than fairy godmothers and magic wands. The dream ball is there, however, and a most decorative and enjoyable affair it is - with ice cream and a king who talks the broadest cockney. Moments of quite moving pathos are charmingly acted by Glynis Johns as Cinderella, and Sebastian Shaw as her policeman lover, while other amusing and imaginative performances are given by J. Hubert Leslie, William Hutchison and Bruce Winston’. The Birmingham Daily Gazette, 24 December 1937. The same notice in the Nottingham Journal of the same date. The production was also reviewed in The Scotsman (24 December 1937), the Sheffield Independent (28 December 1937), the Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer (28 December 1937: ‘Its references to wounded men and refugees may be obscure to a generation now growing up who already are asking “What did grandfather do in the Great War?”), The Era (30 December 1937: the play ‘may be a little dated in its war-time setting’), The Stage (31 December 1937), and the Buckinghamshire Examiner (31 December 1937). The Times, Saturday 15 January 1938, advertised the last two performances that day of A Kiss for Cinderella at the Phoenix Theatre.