STEINBECK AND SHAW IN A PRISON-CAMP!

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 220, 10 September 1943, Page 12

STEINBECK AND SHAW IN A PRISON-CAMP!

What Soldiers In Captivity Do To Keep Themselves Entertained

(Written for "The Listener’ by

D. RUSSELL

RANKIN

| IME drags when you are a | | prisoner-of-war, and soon after arriving in "Campo Concentramento per Prigionieri di Guerra Numero 52," situated not far from Chiavari on the Italian Riviera, I began to take an interest in the entertainment side of our life. It was a new camp, so we started almost from scratch; there was no place for recreation or concerts or games, and the library boasted only 80 books for 3000 men. . . . To away the winter evenings we first arranged for lecturers to visit the various huts and talk on any subjects

with which they were acquainted. This scheme, run by an Entertainment Committee, produced remarkable results, and the subjects varied from a wrestler’s experiences, by Percy Foster, the South African wrestling star, to the intricacies of the London telephone system by two English P. and T. men. An Australian padre not only attended to the spiritual side of things, but also proved able to recount from memory, in the minutest detail, the stories of Dracula and Jamaica Inn.’ My own contribution was to give more than 40 two-hour talks on Hollywood and the film industry! Card tournaments also helped to pass the hours, and, as the camp gradually found its feet, we purchased musical in-struments,-a_ piano, guitars, violin, trumpet, and so on-and concerts began to take shape. A mouth-organ band was also organised. As the weather ‘improved open-air concerts became possible and later the Italians obliged by completing a recreational hall, which we converted into a theatre to accommodate 1500 at a pinch. Our entertainments gradually reached a pretty high standard, and this camp now boasts a 19-piece symphony orchestra, a swing band, an accordion band, a choir, and all the other requisites of a first-class concert party. Their achievements have ranged from full performances of The Messiah to a pantomime, Dick Whittington. Play-Acting Under Difficulties My own interest was in theatricals and I helped to form a dramatic society in the early days of the camp. The prospects at that time were not very bright, however, because we had no plays, no theatre, no costumes, and no actors. Still, five kindred spirits got together and decided to do what they could. We had no plays, so we wrote to the Red Coss and Y.M.C.A. and in a comparaively short time, several volumes of these arrived, mostly of the one-act variety. In the meantime, we wrote our own. They were not oustanding examples of stagecraft-but better than nothing. We had no regular place to rehearse and were hounded from one spot to another; we had no costumes and no means of buying materials, but we looted sheets and scrounged old clothes in all directions; we had no furniture, but it is amazing what can be done with stools

and blankets; we had no properties, but an ingenious craftsman can work wonders with the residue of Red Cross food parcels. The Turning-Point At first we contented ourselves with one-act or two-act plays such as Cathérine Parr and The Old Bull, and plays we wrote ourselves, adapted from novels such as The Mouthpiece, The Time Factor, and Jeeves to the Rescue. We even attempted Shakespeare, but Richard II, though it pleased our padres, did not find popular favour. At this time our audiences averaged between 300 and 500 persons and were steadily increasing. Then came the turning-point. Into our ever-growing library came a copy of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, one of the most successful plays staged on Broadway in recent years. Though the majority at first considered it impossible, we decided to go ahead with our most ambitious project-the production of a two and a-half hour broadway show in a prison-camp! And so we began. There were long hours of copying out parts-all done by hand, since we had no typewriters-and rehearsals totalling eight hours a day, while we learnt a little of what professionals go through. We spent five weeks rehearsing Of Mice and Men and then gave it the biggest "advertising campaign" possible, with the aid of effective "one-sheet" posters done by an R.A.F. pilot who is a commercial artist in civilian life. The Italians Were Helpful Finally, to create the correct setting of the Salinas River country required by the plot, we persuaded the Italian camp authorities to let us scour the countryside (accompanied by the _inevitable guards, of course), and bring back a miniature forest of ferns and shrubs. A problem that now faced us for the first time was to make our "leading lady" (Continued on next page)

Entertaining The Prisonersof-«War

(Continued from previous page) appear natural-a female impersonator in the vaudeville style was not enough; we could not afford to let the audience laugh at "her," or the dramatic effect would be ruined. But costuming and make-up overcame this difficulty and tHe presentation of the character of "Curley’s wife" by a young Englishman was extraordinarily lifelike. Of Mice and Men was an assured success, and a packed and applauding house of 1500 told us that the Camp Amateur Dramatic Society (or the "CADS," as we called ourselves) had made history. From this time on, almost nothing was considered impossible, and among the plays produced during the last year or so have been Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and Arms and the Man; Noel Coward's Hay Fever; R. C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End; and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest. The players in these shows are truly representative of. the Empire, including Englishmen, Australians, New -Zealanders, South Africans, and Canadians. From Camp to Hospital Later I was sent from Camp 52 to work in a large Italian hospital in Lucca, Tuscany, given over entirely to British sick and wounded. Daily contact with Italian doctors and sisters soon gave me a pretty good working knowledge of the language, and for about a year, with two others, I had the job of translating a daily 10-minute news bulletin in English from the Florence newspapers. This was copied and read in every ward in the hospital, so that the patients and staff had some sort of idea of what was happening in the outside World. Also, we got busy again on organising and entertainments; concerts were started, and later a dramatic society came into being; and this time we had many advantages in our favour. Apart from having gained experience at Chiavari, we had facilities for rehearsal and a better wardrobe; there were Greek and Slav internee patients in the hospital, and we could draw on their civilian clothing for costumes. In fact, for our

"leading lady" we had a Slav dressdesigner create "original" gowns from material bought outside the hospital. They Wrote Their Own Our first show at Lucca was the already-proven Of Mice and Men, and this was followed by Anthony Armstrong’s 10 Minute Alibi. But once again we faced a shortage of plays, so once again we wrote our own. An Australian, Ted Broomhead, wrote and produced The Comet, a thriller, and I followed up by writing and producing a musical drama based on the life of the composer Stephen Foster, and featuring an entire Christy minstrel show woven into the plot. As both these were two and a-half hour shows and received success comparable with that of the work of Shaw and Coward, we felt we hadn’t done so badly! Just before I left Lucca on the longawaited journey home, our shortage of plays was alleviated through the interest of an Italian officer who secured scripts for us from the Florence Repertory Library, which included the works of Shaw, Maugham, O’Neill, Coward, and many other authors. So there were at least plenty of plays available-but they were in Italian. It merely remained for us to translate them back into English; Translating an entire book or play is no light task, especially when one has to do it all in one’s own handwriting. However, before leaving, I completed the full script of that vintage farce by Brandon Thomas, Charley’s Aunt. ‘A couple of months later, in Cairo, I was able to see Jack Benny’s recent film version of it. My translation wasn’t so bad after all! Though my recollections of prisoner-of-war entertainments apply only te Chiavari and Lucca, they may be an indication of the way in which the British and Dominions soldier overcomes the boredom of captivity in every camp, in Germany as well as in ‘Italy. And these concerts and plays should improve even more in the future as those of us who have returned are able to give the British Red Cross an idea of what is wanted -and, as always, that magnificent organisation, which never fails the prisoner-of-war, will deliver the goods.