“YOUNG WOODLEY”

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 684, 8 June 1929, Page 14

“YOUNG WOODLEY”

A FASCINATING PLAY In “Young Woodley,” the author, John Van Lruten, exploits that youthful fever which is contemptuously and very foolishly dismissed by sensible people as “calf love.” This play, to be produced by a new English company at His Majesty’s Theatre on Tuesday next, deals with the love of a boy of 18 for a woman several years older than himself —the wife of his housemaster.

It is an interesting: study of the attitude of young lads to the god of love. One lad sees love as a series of discreditable and furtive episodes with servant girls, one does not believe there is really any such thing as romantic. love —the third. Young Woodley, is a poet and sees love as a poet would. The general impression is that the author has started out with a serious intention of studying something very delicate and very subtle, and that the producer got hold of it and “put the punch” in it.

It serves to introduce some

clever and interesting new actors to theatregoers. Of these, perhaps, Mr. Lewis Shaw, as Woodley, is the most interesting. He is, for so youthful an actor, very full of the sense of a most difficult part, in which he has to express the awkwardness of diffident youth brought face to face with life. He is able to present the psychology of a schoolboy in a-phase which, though unfamiliar to their parents, is perfectly true and entirely usual —the awakening interest and puzzle of sex. Miss Natalie Moya, too, makes a very charming and gentle instructress in love to the young hero. She shows a capacity for restrained emotion, which is not at all common, and her part of the last scene in which the voung wife tries to undo any spiritual damage she feels she may have done, is a really moving piece of acting. The box plans are open at Messrs. Lewis Lady for the season.