To-night's programme for 2 YA appears on page

Evening Post, Volume CXIV, Issue 90, 13 October 1932, Page 7

To-night's programme for 2 YA appears on page

HAPPY AND GLORIOUS^

AN UNUSUAL PLAY,

"Happy and Glorious," a play with an evident purpose which is likely to be overlooked,. was produced at the Opera House last night for the first time in New Zealand. It was offered as a play in three acts by Wilford Walter.' The principal characters are two, He and She, taken by Mr. Barry K. Barnes and Miss Rawlings respectively, the Robert Browrung and Elizabeth Barrett in the recent production of "The Barretts of AVimpole Street." To each act there are five scenes, like a sort of rosary, five beads with three episodes, but all on one string. As a play, "Happy and Glorious" is difficult to classify, but it appeared to drive home to the audience last night something of the simple faith and wisdom of the mystical engraver William Blake; v in fact, his verses, beginning "And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England's mountain green," were affectingly sung off-stage as the curtain fell for the last time. If the play was written and produced with the object of exposing the ghastliness of materialism - when it is allowed to flourish like some rank and poisonous weed among a people of highl destiny and noble tradition, then it achieved its purpose. It certainly ought to have made all who followed it last night think long and deeply 1 It was performed in an eminently artistic and finished i manner. But if it was designed to make men and women think, then it may be asked: .What about? Let those who will seethe play to-night, its last performance here, answer the question for themselves. The whole of the audience for the time being last night was constituted as a common jury far exceeding the twelve good men and true. Certain facts were forcefully brought before it, and some grim exhibits put in, and after eloquent argument a verdict was required of the jury. The audience, as juries do, retired to consider its verdict, and it is still oiit. Serious as was the import of the play, yet it had its humorous, moments which were very welcome, if only to relieve the tension of other scenes. The bitterness of the suffragette conflicts, the anguish of the war, the agony and neglect and misunderstanding of the men broken by the war, and the futility and madness of it all were all exposed, and again recalled William Blake's lines, "I give you the end of a golden string." The last scene of all was like the first, an expressionistic background of the Susses Downs as typical of "England's green and pleasant land" and as that land ought to be and could be were England's faith and ideals as noble as the poet's. The play opened with a pair of loving lovers < discovered picnicking on a knoll, and discussing women's rights andr wrongs, all in the beauty of the Downs, with the sea in sight, a lark singing high in the: air, and a cobalt. sky. There follow a Trafalgar _ Square suffragette demonstration, a window-smashing, Holloway Gaol, and after that the remote diapasons of big guns booming across the Channel to the Downs, with She reclining again oni the knoll, but changed in mind and raiment. The war is on, and the next act presents it in all its hideousness with grim ■ realism. And after the war the bitterness of disillusionment. Almost_ t"he whole weight of, the play was carried by Miss Rawlings and Mr. Barnes, and their acting was art of a very high order. A colloquy between a Yorkshire Tommy and a Jock at "the' —— base" was a brilliant piece of comedy,1 grim as it also was. The stage effects were simple in the extreme, but tellingly effective. "Happy and Glorious" will be repeated this evening, but for the last time during this season of the .accomplished company headed by Miss Rawlings. The play was preceded by a clever little piece in which the characters were.two wax busts in a hairdresser's window. This was the work of Mr. Gabriel Toyne, the accomplished producer of the play that followed. Appropriate and contemporary incidental music was played.