Listening While I Work (31)

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 257, 26 May 1944, Page 18

Listening While I Work (31)

By

Materfamilias

story, don’t listen to the new BBC production, Travellers’ Tales. It is another in the Album and Scrapbook series-all sorts of odds and ends drawn from tactfully variegated positions of the Empire. Last Friday there was something about Tonga and Canada and New Zealand and South Africa, linked by the words "The Globe Spins Round"; or something to that effect. The New Zealand episode-the story of Pelorus Jack-was the most interesting, the Afrikaans cradle song the most charming. The whole thing was desultory, moments of considerable dullness relieved by typically light touches, e.g., consulting Liddell and Scott in person for a meaning. Those few moments were worth the rest of the half-hour to me. ik you want a good Munchausen Ea * x T is a good many years since I read Jane Austen’s Emma, so I felt I could listen to the radio version with a far more open mind than if I had come fresh from re-reading it. Yes, I remember Mr. Knightley and Jane Fairfax and Miss Bates, who talked so much and got everything muddled, but somehow they have grown harder and sharper. Is it that in only hearing and not seeing Emma (for Jane Austen lets us, see her) we lose so much, or was she always the rude little hussy of this tadio version? When I have listened for a few more Monday mornings, I will return to the book to find out just how much we lose by listening rather than reading. For radio, and especially the serial, concentrates on Plot. Each episode must end at some dramatic pointpoor Mr. Elton, the rector, has to stay in the stream for a whole week-and all the delicate delineation of character has to be sacrificed to action. The wreckage may not be quite so complete as it was, for instance, in the film version of Pride and Prejudice, where technicolour Old World furniture and costume swamped the things that I liked best in Jane Austen. Not that I want to condemn out of hand a radio version of Jane Austen, but I think it is a pity that a book like Emma should have to be taken in small doses at set intervals like a_ patent medicine. % * * REBECCA is a different story. It should suit the microphone without much adaptation. But I am not sure that it does. The first episodes promised well, but it remains to be seen whether the all-pervading and sinister influence of the dead Rebecca can make itself felt over the air in serial shocks. Still, I have no doubt that many people will listen if only to remind themselves of a book and a picture that they liked or heard a good deal about. * * * HERE is nothing subtle in the propaganda behind The Living Theatre series of plays which are on the air from ZB stations on Sunday nights. Nazi Octopus, which I heard on a recent Sunday, is a real old-style thriller. The hero, despite his dash, looks as though he is the villain, and the chief of police turns out to be a crook; there is a real deep-throated maiden of the south, who lures strong men to give up their (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) secrets and then shoots them; maps are copied; and there are plenty of most suspicious foreign accents. It is, as you will have gathered, a spy thriller of the usual variety, set in a Caribbean background, and if you enjoy spy stories, you will enjoy this, though you will probably also feel as I do that the truth about Nazi activities in this part of the world may be even stranger than this fiction.