"THE FIRE ON THE SNOW"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 134, 16 January 1942, Page 8

"THE FIRE ON THE SNOW"

New Zealander’s Radio Drama About Scott’s Expedition

YOUNG New Zealand writer, Douglas Stewart, son of a solicitor at Eltham, and now in Australia, has written a radio play The Fire on the Snow, which has been hailed by one critic as "the finest written radio play yet to come out of Australia, and among the finest written anywhere." The Fire on the Snow was performed twice by the ABC with some of the best known radio players in Australia, including Frank Harvey, Lou Vernon, Peter Bathurst, Peter Finch, John Alden, and Ida Osborne in the cast. It has been bought by the National Broadcasting Service, and it is hoped to produce it over the air in New Zealand some time in the near future. The play tells in verse the story of Captain Scott’s expedition to the South Pole, of the hardships endured in reaching it, to find that Amundsen and his party of Norwegians had been there first, and of the tragic return from the Pole, losing first Evans, then Oates, then Bowers, until finally Scott and Wilson were left to die together in their tent. Douglas Stewart went from high school to Victoria University College, Wellington, and was with several New Zealand newspapers before he worked his passage to England on a cargo boat. After gaining some experience in England he worked his way back again, to Australia this time, and settled down to a job on the literary staff of the Sydney Bulletin. He has published books of verse, Green Lions (before he left New Zealand), The White Cry (published by Dents), Elegy for an Airman (which was illustrated by Norman Lindsay), and Sonnets to an Unknown Soldier, in Australia. Two Kinds of Language The Fire on the Snow admittedly owes something to Archibald MacLeish,

whose poetic\drama The Fall of the City demonstrated conclusively that fine language and colloquial dialogue can be wedded in a radio play with striking results, The debt to MacLeish, however, is in inspiration only; the play itself is completely individual, The verse is modern, and Stewart has not been afraid to resort to symbolic expression. As Leslie Rees pointed out in The ABC Weekly, "it is verse meant for speaking, and ranges from the sculptured exactitude of the Narrator’s linking lyrics to the easy-going colloquialism of the men in er less intense moments." The theme of the play is set out simply by the Narrator: But the reply comes; the world is spun Between two giant hands of ice And on any peak of living won From hardest hours, the blissards hiss, And the reward set for the blindest taith In the fixed needle directing us Is to reach the Pole; and the Pole is death. ‘ ‘ " Against this beautiful coalescence of form and meaning, meaning pouring out with apparent spontaneity as though unaware of the sheer discipline imposed by metre and the half-rhyme or assonance commonly used by Stewart in this play-against that distillation of thought and word," says Leslie Rees, "comes an almost slangy everyday speech tactfully used to relieve the modern ear and aid naturalism: WILSON; Seriously though, I saw last winter how the climate changed us,

We hardly spoke once that long silver twilight Had really begun to permeate our bodies. EVANS: You mean to say we’re balmy? OATES: Of course you are, And so am I, hauling a sledge to the Pole When I might be home where there’s food and fires and women, "But it is a colloquialism supple to a moment’s change of mood, and can purify and elevate itself as it wills. There is Scott’s passing nostalgia: I like to think of the lights of Piccadilly And of how in the smoky park among the oaks All London suddenly breaks on you like thunder. It was not necessary to clothe the story of the expedition with drama as cold bare bones with a cloak. The simple facts carry at times an almost too heavy burden of drama and the sense of fate. The scene where Oates goes out into the snow to die is told simply: Nobody move, don’t move, I am just going outside, I may be some time. To have embroidered on the stark simplicity of Scott’s diary would have been fatal. Brilliant Contrast Again to quote Leslie Rees: "The blinding monotony, the stiff cold touch of perpetual ice and snow are in every speech. You feel how the cold numbed the marrow of Scott’s men. Cold until =

they are like walking stalagmites. Cold until they die of it. But that is not all. The contrasting warmth of flame is as continually evoked, in fact, is a counterpoint through the play. It is brilliantly done, this antithetical symbolism of ice and flame, the frozen rigour of the task and the fire of man’s hardihood. "So that the text leaps and flashes with colour and sense-feeling, freezing and blazing: Agony. Two dead men; and a dying man remembering, The burning snow, the crags towering like flame. The first ABC production of The Fire on the Snow created a small sensation, The ABC Weekly noted that it had prevoked more correspondence than had any other play or feature, and devoted an editorial article to "The Beauty of Words," with special reference to Douglas Stewart’s fine language. The play was repeated a second time over the ABC.