REPERTORY PRODUCTION

Dominion, Volume 33, Issue 191, 9 May 1940, Page 5

REPERTORY PRODUCTION

For the first time in Now Zealand, Harley Granville-Barker's “The Voysey Inheritance,” a play in live acts, will be staged by the Wellington Repertory Theatre in the concert chamber of the Town Hall on Saturday night. There will be four other performances. Mr. Leo du Chateau will direct the performances. Mr. A. E. Morgan, a critic of The Times,” London, says that “The Voysey Inheritance” attains a high degree of realism, the picture of the solicitors' office of Voysey and Son (act 1), and the home life in the Voysey dining-room being almost photographic. The dialogue is far different from the smart parry and thrust of Pinero and Wilde, and there is none of the witty absurdity of Shaw, he continues. Mr. Voysey himself is as delicate a studj' in moral obliquity as any literature, and this is thrown into sharp contrast by the righteous idealism of his son, Edward. Mrs. Voysey, a deaf, cultured and not. unhappy old woman : Honour, the older daughter, the family hewer of wood and drawer of water; the younger daughter, Ethel, wildly seeking to find a means of selbexpression in her love for the young Denis Iregonitig, solicitor; Beatrice, wife of Hugh Voysey, a protagonist of freedom, ami who decides to leave her husband: Alice .Maitland, who marries Edward, and conies to realize rightly that complete and untrammelled freedom is neither possible nor desirable, and teaches this lesson to Edward—all these are but a few of the 18 interesting characters.