WRITES PLAYS

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 40, 10 May 1927, Page 15

WRITES PLAYS

YORKSHIRE MILL-HAND A small and.sparely built man, with black hair, a domed forehead, and brown eyes shielded by heavy-rimmed spectacles, Mr. James R. Gregson, the Yorkshire dramatist, is taking an active part in the British Industries Fair at Shepherd’s Bush, states the “Daily Chronicle.” He spends by far the greater part of his time working as a costing clerk for a Leeds firm of pram and toy manufacturers. But through his spare-time occupation he is known to London, Hew York and provincial playgoers as the Stanley Houghton of Yorkshire. So far fortune has not favoured him with heavy money bags in return for his industry. He told a “Daily Chronicle” representative that he never earned more than £4 a week until recently. It was considerably less when he filled in a spell of unemployment with occasional turns as a bricklayer’s labourer. “Still the money will come all in good time,” he said, with a cheerful laugh. Mr. Gregson describes himself as a “very slow writer,” but in 10 years, seven of which were filled with a terrible struggle to make ends meet at home, he has written three full-length plays, “T’ Marsden’s,” “Young Imeson,” and “Sar’ Alice,” and three oneact plays—“Liddy,” “Melchisedeck,” and “The Way of An Angel,” taken an active part in producing and stagemanaging them, and produced an extraordinary variety of plays, operas, sketches, and pantomimes at Leeds and Huddersfield. Early Years Mr. Gregson declares that he acquired his dramatic sense in the old “blood tubs,” where he was sent as a small boy every week for several years. “My father gave me 3d to go on condition I told him all about the play I had seen. As long as I live I shall never forget seeing the late Mrs. Bandman Palmer as ‘Hamlet.’ She was so , stout that she had to sit down in the ghost scene. They provided her with a beer bottle box, and the local brewer who loned it stipulated that his name should remain on view as an advertisement. “One smiles at this distance, but my experience has convinced me that no actor can reach perfection until he can feel at home in Shakespeare and melodrama. Most actors of to-day would be all the better for the old timer’s habit of speaking up.” Mr. Gregson as a boy worked in a mill in Brighouse. He was a railway clerk when he wrote “T* Marsden’s,” “Young Imeson,” and “Liddy,” and these so impressed Mr. Alfred Wareing of the Theatre Royal, Huddersfield, that Mr. Gregson was invited to work at the theatre and learn playwriting and producing. He is now framing another play. “So far,” he said, "all my plays have been around the working classes, because I know only that class thoroughly. Some day, when I know more of other classes, ' shall widen the character of my plays.”