The theater, the cinema and ourselves (1947)

11. SCHOOL-GIRLS We are turning to some sort of sanity with regard to school-girls as well. The under sixteens were during most of the nineteenth century considered goofy and awkward, now it is often we who feel goofy and awkward. We are realizing that when Holbein painted his famous Duchess of Milan he was painting a quite young girl and we have re-discovered that Juliet was just a young girl too — a young girl who might have been living in Wimbledon or Hammersmith. There have been attempts lately to give perhaps a too childish Juliet, but Renee Asherson got inside Juliet's girlish heart with a sincerity and charm that few will forget. Even Juliet's punning, a difficult passage, had the delight of a child. Many of us have been dwelling in a confused jumble of misconceptions about school-girls and have thereby lost a great deal of their poetry and their commonsense. It is time that we forgot their lack of balance and thought of ours instead. It is difficult to understand why we should have treated them as fully grown women or as mere infants instead of as the delightful people they are. It is as difficult to understand as why in many of Shakespeare's plays we treated these school-girls' fathers as doddering old men. Possibly it was only one of the blunders that the Victorians, and even the Georgians, made and that earlier these absurdities were not so common. But even in our sincerer age we still sometimes have the school-girl falsely dramatized, the spirit of the girl of all periods ignored and especially the spirit of the girl of to-day. No one acquainted with school girls during the long years of war could help being struck by the utter insincerity of no room at the inn, even as drama it seemed absurd. Yet only a few minutes' walk away was the Swiss film, marie louise, a touching tale of the Juliet (Renee Asherson). ig46. 25