Institute Hall, Upper Tooting, London

‘The taste of the Bec Literary Institute is as worthy as its talents … On Saturday, the Society maintained its good standard of matter and manner by performing plays by the Poet Laureate and Mr. Bernard Shaw in the Institute Hall, Beechcroft-road, Upper Tooting. Mr. John Masefield’s play was “The Tragedy of Man,” and Mr. Shaw’s, his one-act sermon in crude melodrama, “The Showing Up of Bianco Posnet.” The second production was the more spirited and entertaining. but the first was the more skilful, because of the handicap which the cast had to fight … Mr. Shaw’s love for picking foolish laws to pieces, mocking conventions and diverting us with the inconsistency of his characters, and the triumphs of the most unlikely, was interpreted with fine spirit in “Blanco Posnet.” Mr. S. W. Griffin’s boisterous and inspired treatment of Blanco, the philosophical horse thief, was a conspicuous delight. The primitive Wild West courthouse scene was well staged, and Mr. Herbert Mumford’s fool of a sheriff, Mr Alfred Swinson (Blanco’s “rotten” hypocrite of a brother), and Mr. J. Steinhart, as Blanco’s unscrupulous prosecutor, gave lively performances with rich support from some of the supers. Miss Freda Mortimer, as one of those highly-painted women who prowl vampishly around Wild West saloons with twisted lips and arms akimbo, drawled competently, but looked far too charming for such a pursuit’ (Norwood News, Friday 12 December 1930).