DECISION OF THE CERCLE

With the announcement in today's CRIMSON, the Cercle Francais indicates that it too is alive to Modern Times. Not so extreme that patrons of their dramatic production will spend the first act in vain attempts to make sense out of the doings of those upon the stage and the last two in a program-thumbing defeatism, still the members of the Cercle show a heartening discontent with mere conventional performance. The staging of seventeenth century plays in modern dress is not entirely unprecedented, but hitherto the creations of Moliere have been passed over by the managers who have put Hamlet and Macbeth into sack suits. Modernistic scenery in various phases has appeared rather frequently on American stages, as patrons of the Dramatic Club have discovered, but heretofore the French plays at Harvard, as generally throughout the country have been characterized by an eager duplication of the traditional mode.

The decision of the Cercle Francais to carry on entirely without the help of professional coaches or actors, prompted though it may have been by unpublished practical considerations, follows satisfactorily the tendency on the part of undergraduate activities toward a purer amateurism. Such technical guidance as may be necessary is amply provided for in the participation of a few experienced graduate students interested enough to offer the value of their knowledge in exchange for a return intrinsic in the activities themselves. The consequent removal of an authority made fearsome by its measurement in dollars and cents injects a healthy consciousness of responsibility into the student management which has already fructified in the experimentation projected for this season's dramatic productions.