DRAMATIC CLUB REVIEWS

The Harvard Dramatic Club has every, reason to be pleased with "Pudding Full of Plums". . . . It is one of the best acted and directed productions in several seasons and it is, which is even more important, the first play by a Harvard undergraduate given by the club in 17 years. Young Mr. Eager has a definite flair for writing dialogue, and he manages, with a skill not always found even in mature playwrights, to move his characters about in a manner that suggests natural impulse rather than the arbitrary manoeuvering of a puppet master. The theme of his play--the irreconcilability of opposite temperaments--is quite well handled, too, even though we suspect him of a shade too much fondness for the current vogue of up in the air endings. By Elinor Hughes   "Boston Traveler"

. . . . the author is a "promising playwright." He has the knack of making a scene move, however trifling its import. He is not yet the biographer of Charming People, the talent that his predecessor, Phillip Jerome Quinn Barry, developed so neatly in the Harvard atmosphere, but he can place words, phrases and pronouncements into the mouths of his actors and make them sound like life.   By George Holland   "Boston Evening American"

Whatever the results as they now concern a curious and primarily entertainment-seeking audience, the Club deserves a word of commendation for its recapture of a tradition that seems, in spite of the obvious hazards, at once a duty and a privilege.

Amusingly Mr. Eager sets these folk down on paper, catches the glamorous artificialities of their small talk.

Mr. Eager, though he has failed to tell his story in terms of the theatre, presents it engagingly. No one can deny him the plausibility of his basic situation, or the ingratiating quality of his central characters. Despite a facile ability to mock, to gain an honest laugh with the neatly arranged summations of an individualized and quixotically observing eye, he argues forthrightly, within the limitations of his immaturity, both sides of his theme.

If "Pudding Full of Plums" has any theatric vitality in the present production, it is mainly due to the remarkably fine work of Miss Lois Hall in the role of Ann, and to the interesting direction of John Cecil Haggot.   W. E. H.   "Boston Evening Transcript"

The young men of the Harvard Dramatic Club, who have been tilling new dramatic soil for long, lean years and harvesting nothing but headaches, have apparently dug their spades, at last, into fertile ground teeming with promise of rich returns.

"Pudding Full of Plums" is a slight play; it lacks body. It is a talky play; its action is very limited. On the other hand it has some characters who have reason for being; it has a problem worth consideration, a problem which the playwright solves justifiably and logically, and it has--best of all--dialogue which is nearly always convincing and very often genuinely witty.   By Eliot Norton   "Boston Post"