AUCKLAND ENTERTAINERS

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 188, 29 October 1927, Page 22 (Supplement)

AUCKLAND ENTERTAINERS

Thurza Rogers, who became leading lady at a week’s notice to take the chief part in the Melbourne production of “Tip Toes,” records first-night impressions: "It was worse than I thought. The people at the theatre were so kind that they didn’t tell me the worst. I thought it was only a matter of learning and speaking the lines. Now I know that if you play opposite comedians, they do something dreadful if you don’t speak the line in such a way as to let them get two laughs where only one grows in the script. That’s what makes a comedian. To tread on the laugh of a comedian makes him howl worse than if it was his corn. I didn’t know.”

and her soul begins to revolt at motherhood, and she comes to you and spreads out her hands, and says, “Do I look like a mother?”

What are you to say? When you ask a man to be a burglar many times in succession, it begins to look as if you think he is a burglar. But what are you to do? You know that he is not a burglar any more than a girl is a mother. But there you are; they have the ability; one to look like a mother and the other to look like a burglar, and neither of them looks like either a vampire or a hero on the stage.

Actors are born and not made. As a matter of fact, I believe that they are born to play certain parts. Have you ever noticed the vast difference between an Australian and an English - man? Very likely not. You should see an Australian trying to plav the part of a young Englishman. That, I believe, is the one thing he can’t play. He is as futile as an Englishman trying to be an Australian. But the Australian is a born actor. In these days of the commercial manager, who is not an actor, the repertory movement more than anything else is likely to give him a chance. In these days on the professional stage a company is selected in England to do one play; then it is brought out here. If an Australian is put in, he is not taught to act, but; licked into the shape needed to fill the part; not as it might be played; but as somebody was seen to play it in London. Commercially, that is the successful way to produce him.

We Australians are inordinately fond of criticising each other. I feel that we are always looking sideways at each other to see who is making a fool of himself. Artistically, this is suicide. Genius generally begins by looking foolish.

Once, for instance, we were getting a lot of good Australian plays, now we get very few. The reason is that the critics know the writers too well. If Bernard Shaw had been an Aus- , tralian and had written a play, they | would be saying, “Bernard Shaw; ay: ! fancy him trying to write a play. I went to school with him.” Another would say, “I knew his old man.” The thought of Bernard Shaw sets me off at a tangent. I wonder what the real influence of the man is. He has done more for repertory than any other play writer. Also repertory has done much for Bernard Shaw. Ninety per cent. of Australians who write ' plays, write with Shaw in the back of j their minds. In that lie is a blight. I There can be only ode Shaw.