You Can't Go, Home, Again

Britain's Lord Home must never fume, even if people pronounce his name to rhyme with gnome instead of plume. He is, after all, Her Majesty's Foreign Secretary, the model of a modern diplomat, discreeter than Nikita, never brusque with Rusk. But the other night Lord Home may have wanted to fume, or at least show a bit of honest gloom:

He attended a new play by his brother, William Douglas Home, who once wrote The Reluctant Debutante, and who, although only 50, is still turning out some of the best plays of 1887. The new one is about a cigarette girl in the slums of London who takes a customer home with her and soon finds that she is in a family way. The infant boy is sent to America. He returns after 20 years, and by stunning coincidence enters the tawdry cellar nightclub that his mother now owns. The woman stares wet-eyed at her long-lost son. She says nothing, poignantly. The youth must never know that this bulging madam is his mother.

After a hard day at the Foreign Office, Lord Home had an even harder evening in the theater, sitting there opening night "smiling," as one critic described it, "his bland Oriental smile." According to the columns, when his brother later asked him what he thought of The Cigarette Girl, he suavely declared: "It was nostalgic." The critics were not so diplomatic. "Unspeakable .drivel," "said Robert Muller in the Daily Mail. Said the Daily Express' Herbert Kretzmer: "The Cigarette Girl quickly qualified as the most dismal and abysmal heap of rubbish to be mounted in London--in the sacred name of enterainment--in living memory." The play was a smoked-out butt after six performances, and Playwright Home looked down in anger. "Critics," he said with icy disdain, "attack anything they think comes from the Establishment."

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