BEN HUR.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 320, 9 July 1912, Page 8

BEN HUR.

A GREAT PLAY. | It is a very .old-time superstition that ; demands that the Church and the Stage. I shall be two unassociable horrors, each f against each, as Euclid forgot to men- | tion in his rule of thumb theorems.! But productions like Ben Hur play ducks and drakes with those preconceived no i tions that, so far as the stage is conI cerned, "no good thing can come out of

Nazareth." The play is in a sense a; religious one—at least it is founded upon i a Biblical story—but this does not detract from its merits as a dramatic performance. We have had other semireligious plays—"The Sign of the Cross," with Wilson Barrett in a low-necked dress and "Joseph of Canaan," minus Barney's ox, for instance—but these performances have lacked the element of convincingness. The simple test that might be applied to them, as one critic] has suggested, is whether they could be' ' played in evening dress and dodge the censorship. Ben Hur can bravely chal-1 lenge this criticism. It is a play with- j out a moral that is all morality. Not j to be metaphorical, it is a simple and 1 straightforward presentation of an incident that, while fictional in its genesis, is real in its counterfeit presentment. It is difficult to classify the play, for it is neither "fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red herring," where the ordinary dramatic canons are concerned. It has nothing of modernity to commend it, but it reaches out a long arm and grabs the picturesque past with no uncertain fingers. The striking feature of the production is the fact that the devotional j atmosphere of the play is maintained without its being in any sense obtrusive. This gives to the play a lasting quality that makes it a good deal more than a mere spectacular melodrama. The necessities of stage production—the condensation of days into hours —naturally make it difficult to give realism to the drama, and a good deal has to 'be left to the imagination, but where Ben Hur is con-

corned imagination has a very easy passage. Nearly everybody has read the story, but it requires its stage presentation to bring it vividly before the eye Apart from the excellence of the acting, the play is brilliantly spectacular, even when the limitations of a New Plymouth stage are taken into consideration. In the title-role Mr. Eris Maxon was consistently good. He played the part of Ben Hur like a true artist, differentiating its various phases with an almost painful humanness. His delightful quality of restraint was one of the inost noticeable features of his performance. The necessity of compression at times made the acting seem a little overdone, but this is inevitable in a production of this character. Still, generally speaking, the .presentation was an unqualifiedly stirring one. Mr. Leonard Willey conveyed an excellent idea of the arrogant, licentious and false Messala. The faithful servitude and wisdom of the aged and maimed steward, Simonides, were capably pre-, sented by Mr. Eardley Turner. Mr. A. Styan made an imposing Sheik Iderim,' and Mr. J. B. Atholwood was very good as Balthazar. Particularly well presenter were the female parts. As Iras, Mis 3 Gwen Burroughs played her part artistically and vividly. Esther was excellently portrayed by Miss Dorothy Dix, whose I methods were admirably adapted to the meek and faithful daughter of Simonides. Miss Susie Vaughan, too, -was well suited to the dignified and material mother of Ben Hur. As Tirzah, sister of Ben Hur, Miss Alma Phillips was effective. The role of Amrah, Ben Hur's nurse, was very well played by Miss Alma Vaughan. Especially effective was her part in the first scene, in which Judah is torn from his family by the Roman legionaries. Of the other characters it must be sufficient to say that they were all well placed. The mechanical and scenic effects vrer« Bimply remarkable in view of the necessary limitations of the staging.