Listening While I Work (14)

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 240, 28 January 1944, Page 16

Listening While I Work (14)

By

Materfamilias

ISTENING to radio plays is always a shot in the dark. At the best you hope you won’t be bored. At the worst you may hope not to have missed anything better at another station. In this mood I tuned in to 2YC for Three Men on a Raft last Sunday evening. But I was pleasantly surprised. I could not help thinking that the producer of this play must have been well satisfied. The play in the first place is good entertainment. Three men, survivors from a torpedoed boat, are on a raft at sea. Irritated and exhausted, they begin discussing the near escapes they have had, and each man in turn tells his story. It is, if you like, a loose and well-worn way of binding together three tales, a modern Canterbury Pilgrims, but for this reason it is especially well suited to radio. Narrative goes well over the air, and can fade easily into the dramatised incident. The three men, the English author, the Cockney railwayman, the Irishman, naturally have differing voices and dialects, and their stories are different. I found the Irishman’s story a little hard

to follow, but whether that was due to my ignorance of Irish or the deficiencies of my set or of the speaker, I cannot say, but I give the Irishman the benefit of the doubt. The first story was the best. The speaker, the English author, at times dropped his voice till it was inaudible, but he gave an illusion of an exhausted man. His story was convincingly exciting, and no small part of the credit for this is due to the excellent acting of the lunatic who was vividly and alarmingly insane-not so easy to achieve without the help of make-up and stage appearance. I regret, however, that the names of the actors in radio plays are not announced. I would like to know them and follow them through a variety of parts. The play, like most radio plays, depends on action and plot, not subtlety of characterisation or words. We have still a long way to go before we get a play that will wear well. Radio plays still depend too much upon plot, whereas actually just because the plays are heard and not seen, they could lean much more heavily upon their literary value. * * * ‘THE series of talks Horseback Holiday, by Judith Terry, have been heard by Auckland listeners, and are now going the rounds of the National stations, I enjoyed the ones that I heard. This type of talk appeals to me partly because it is a straightforward narrative based on experience, Too many talks are a hotchpotch of experiences and reading thrown together in the shape of that most difficult literary form, the essay. Essays should contain a heavy enough quantum of philosophy to deserve longer pondering than radio caters for. But Mrs. Terry’s talks are neither philosophical nor discursive. She describes a holiday as a holiday, and her tale is vivid and pleasant. + r * F there is one type of programme more than another that is suited to radio and that has been developed by radio it is what I would call the "tribute" type. I mean the sort of programme built up out of an odd assortment of incidents, experiences, fragments of music, or poetry to give a general impression. I seem to remember in the early days of the war tributes to one country after another that fell victim to Nazi aggression. Another rather effective series of programmes in the same category was The Stones Cry Out, with its flashes of history and its appeal not to sense but to sentiment and sensibility. Last week’s Greek Testament, opening with Byron’s words very movingly spoken and continuing with its glimpses of a pleasant pre-war Greece, a Greece of bumper harvests and simple festivals and fisherfolk who feast and marry and die was, as it was intended to be, good propaganda, We have not known much of the lives of Greek country folk, but we knew that they fought valiantly against overwhelming force, and showed, and still show, the most dangerous gratitude to our own forces. We know also that of all the starving people in peas Europe there are none worse off to-day than the Greeks. With this knowledge, a programme like Greek Testament is all the more poignant. I appreciate it by contrast with some of the programmes which appeal more noisily and obviously to the emotions. In the long run, it is not the ‘thunder and the earthquakes but the still small voice that is remembered.