Listening While I Work (22)

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 248, 24 March 1944, Page 18

Listening While I Work (22)

By

Matertamilias

that I tuned-in to Professor Adams’s "Readings from Shakespeare" from 4YA the other Friday evening. This, I thought, would be the equivalent in the spoken word of classical music. The programme was carefully chosen: Sibelius’s "Prelude to The Tempest," Prof. Adams’s reading of a scene from The Tempest, then thrée songs from the same play. Prof. Adams’s voice is easy to listen to, and he reads as though he enjoys doing it. But speaking for myself, I found the reading of a whole scene by the one person not altogether satisfactory, especially as the parts of Miranda and Ariel need a woman’s and a child’s voice respectively. The effect was rather that of a symphony played on the piano, % % * "Goop NIGHT, NEW WORLD," the play by H. R.. Jeans heard from 2YD the other Wednesday, is not new. It has already been heard from a number of stations and it belongs to the Blitz-and-Morale period of the war. The theme is Wellsian, but it has a more obvious moral than H. G, Wells ever perpetrated. The men of the world of a hundred years or so hence build a time-machine and in a series of visits follow up the life of a man of to-day. They visit him first when he is a-schoolboy, then a student, and finally as a disheartened doctor in blitzed London, and they take him with them to their world to show him the bright land of the future, adorned with beautiful buildings designed by his son as yet unborn, With that promise he faces the immediately tragic future with renewed courage. This is a difficult theme to handle without sentimentality -for it is so much easier to become sentimental about building for the future than to do anything definite about it. In the heat of battle and blitz it is simple to plan in.a vague and general way for a world in which wars are abolished and everyone is happy. (Wars in this New World are abolished because "nations found that they simply didn’t pay.") I would like to think that war-as well as crime and dirt and injustice-could be got rid of so easily. it % * SERIES of stories in two or three parts are running from the ZB stations on Mondays and Wednesdays at 7.15 p.m. This short-long type of story is quite well suited to radio. There is not the drag of the serial. On the other hand, a short story demands more skill in the telling. "Wrongful Detention," the story to which I was listening the other night, may collect a number of youthful listeners. It teems with spies, murders, prison-camps, or rather castles, and other delicacies. Butit is so patently improbable that it is tedious listening for anyone who has passed Standard Six. The British spies talk in a most un-British manner, though when foreigners approach they adopt a forced accent ~-which, incidentally, all the foreigners also use. And I blushed for the behaviour of my fellow Englishmen in their predicament. If we must have improbability, let us have intrepid Scarlet Pimpernels who smile and keep calm and look like Leslie Howard and crack jokes. A (Continued on next page) L was almost with eager anticipation

(Continued from previous page) joke in the face of a foreign police force is worth any number of groans in a fortress-at any rate over the air. % a E are resigned to a long break in our Sunday night opera, but there is surely no need for the break to come as suddenly as it did in Lucia di Lammermoor last Sunday. A new scene had only just begun; Lucia was walking across the floor with downcast eyes, when we were most unceremoniously transported to morale, meat-rationing, and Mr. Bankes Amery. This is the third Sunday night talk devoted to this meaty but well-chewed theme.