ACTING IN SELF-DEFENCE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 272, 8 September 1944, Page 8

ACTING IN SELF--DEFENCE

New Zealand Makes Its Own Plays AR is improvisation. What you can’t buy you make or adapt; but you don’t, if you can help it, go without. That is what hes happened to the play-going section of the community. Visits from overseas companies are almost out of the question, so New Zealand is producing plays without overseas aid. It has, of course, been doing so for a long time, but not on the scale on which the thing has been done this winter. The most important fact, however, is that New Zealand is writing plays as well as producing and acting them. What follows is by no means comprehensive. We have just talked to a few people who happened at the time to be accessible. But we have gleaned enough information to show that there ds great activity in dramatic circles in New Zealand, and that the matter does not begin and end with entertainment.

AN AUCKLAND VENTURE N Auckland recently, Professor W. A. Sewell wrote what he described as a New Morality, No Man Stands Apart. He produced it in the W.E.A. theatre with a cast largely composed of members of the Auckland University College Drama Club. It is a two-act play in everyday war-time language with quotations from the New Testament, Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Mr. Churchill, and others, Seats for the hall for each of the three nights of the performance were booked out more than a week before; repeated requests were made to have the season extended; and finally people just went along and stood in the aisles and doorways, many of them for the whole performance. The first act of the play has one scene, set in the living-room of a work-ing-class house in a London district. The second act has two scenes, the first in an air-raid shelter and the second back in the living-room. The play begins before the outbreak of war and ends after the blitz. There are 10 characters in the cast, Mr. and Mrs. Smith and their sons Jack and Tommie and their daughter Jane, a priest, a Cockney commissionaire and two girls (met briefly in the air-raid shelter scene) and a neighbour. Besides these characters in what might be called the main play there are others who appear on a second stage behind and above the main stage in crowd scenes and scenes with symbolic importance. The actions and words of these secondary characters might be intended to be seen by the audience as if through the eyes and minds of the characters in the main. play. : The theme of man’s dependence on man-in the past as well as in the pre-sent-is presented to the audience firmly; first it is printed, 15 lines of blank verse, on the programme; then it is spoken as a prologue to the first act and, with slight variations, to the two scenes of the second act. Professor Sewell explained to us that he wanted to keep this theme steadily before the audience — the idea that we are not, cannot. be, independent of our fellows and those who have lived before. They are all a part of us. ¢ Later in the year, Margaret Barr, who produced A Midsummer Night's Dream, will produce The Moon. is Down, with a W.E.A. cast in Auckland. ESCAPE FROM ESCAPISM N New Zealand as in other countries there is a movement which aims ‘to put drama to a political purpose. When we asked one member of the Wellington Unity Theatre group to tell us more.

about it, he answered with a passage from a broadcast discussion between John Gielgud and Frank O’Connor, in which Gielgud said: "The fashion of successful plays during the last 40 years has always had a tendency towards high life. Wilde and Pinero started it by showing a lot of actors in beautiful costumes looking more like ladies and gentlemen than the. ladies and gentlemen who came to the theatre to see them. People will always pay money to see people beautifully dressed, sitting about in luxurious surroundings, The cinema after all-with exceptions here and "there — has gone the same way .. . Dodie Smith has starified her leading characters who, though they are supposed to be Mr. and Mrs. Everyman living in St. John’s Wood, are really Fay Compton and Owen Nares sitting in twin beds looking their most glamorous. And that does to a considerable extent limit the scope of the West End stage. With few exceptions, like Priestley, Emlyn Williams, Ronald Mackenzie and Walter Greenwood (author of Love on the Dole) the playwrights don’t give us a chance." "This kind of thing hasn’t been confined to England,’ our informant said. "We think it has been seen in the tendencies of amateur and professional productions in this country. We think that plays of this kind, though they may be well acted and well produced, ignore real human and social problems, and are too often chosen for their box-office appeal alone. It was in this mood that Unity Theatre was formed in Wellington in 1941, It took. its name from a dramatic club in London, which was fostered by Paul Robeson, Sean O’Casey, Sybil Thorndike, Lewis Casson; and others. Its aim is to establish in Wellington a kind of drama which deals with realities, and reflects contemporary life. It is not’ concerned with plays which provide a dream world of escape." NEWS OF REPERTORY EMBERSHIP figures alone tell something of the story of the Wellington Repertory Society. Ten years ago, we were informed by the secretary, George Swan, there were about 300 members; within three years there were nearly a thousand. Over the last few years it has been pegged at a thousand, but now a place with more seating accommodation is being used, and it has jumped up to about 1100. It does six major plays a year, and puts on an evening of "one-acters" every six weeks. From this field many promising recruits come forward, and every now and then some real talent shows up. (continued on next page)

‘ (continued from previous page) But without one professional fulltime company of New Zealanders, to provide high standards for comparison, and a future for the real talent among the amateurs, Mr. Swan feels that drama in New Zealand cannot come to much: an amateur society’s producer is up against the shortage of time for rehearsal; spare time is not enough, and he invariably has an indifferent hall and stage to work in. "We have a first-rate educational instrument in the theatre," he said, "and we ought to use it. Audiences are not as ready to-day to accept indifferent stuff as they were five years ago. On the other hand, when real talent appears locally-as it does now and again-it gets say, two leading parts a year to play, and it dies. away for lack of development, or else it leaves the country." % * N Dunedin, we were informed, the position is even better than in Wellington. There, we were told by Miss Bessie Thompson, who happened to be in Wellington, the. membership of the Repertory Society is 1250. Four major plays a year are produced, and there are "one-acters" evenings every month. One of the major plays is presented for the benefit of patriotic funds, and this year the sum of £1000 was raised by the production of The Man Who Came to Dinner. Other plays. this year were The Corn is Green, by Emlyn Williams, and By Candlelight, a translation from a German play. Next on the list is Flare Path. * * a ‘THE Hutt, which has been x city for nearly five years now, recently established a repertory society of its own, which is already a going concern. It plans one production a year, with evenings of "one-acters,"’ readings, lectures and so on. Its leader is Mrs. Craig Mackenzie, who was well known to Wellington playgoers as Mary Cooley. % * * HERE are, of course, other flourishing repertory societies, whose activity we have not had the opportunity to hear about in detail. Christchurch, Palmerston North, Wanganui and Napier are all going ahead, according to Mr. Swan. In Auckland, conditions differ from those in other centres, because activity is diffused, but the scattered groups are. busy. RELIGIOUS DRAMA NE interesting aspect of the present ferment in the amateur theatre world is what one might call the discovery, or rediscovery, of the drama by church people as a medium of religious expression. In Wellington, for example, there is now a Religious Drama Society, which holds fortnightly play-readings, and which this week is presenting its first public production, A Man’s House (John Drinkwater’s play about a family in Jerusalem at the time of the Crucifixion). The Wellington Religious Drama Society is also sponsoring a modern morality play which will be performed this month in the Wellington Town Hall to inaugurate Wellington’s "Christian Order" Week. The play, which has been specially written for the purpose of dramatising the éssential "message" of the week, lasts about 45 minutes, and its action will lead up to the main address for the evening. (continued on next page)

ACTING IN SELF-DEFENCE (continued from previous page) We asked Howard Wadman, the author of this morality play (which is entitled Youth Wants to Know), for some details about it, He said that it will ‘employ drapes, but no scenery; there will be special use of lighting, and just enough "props" and costumes will be used to identify the various characters. Thus, the Business Man will sit in, a swivel-chair behind a big desk; the Machinist will be working at a lathe, and so on. But the whole action will take place in "a patch of light surrounded by a great darkness." "The ancient morality plays of the Church were derived from the universal experiences of mankind," said Mr. Wadman. "Here is one, however, which has been written for a special purpose; its action arises out of special, conternporary conditions — perhaps, in some ways, even special Wellington conditions. "The question may be asked; should we, in stich circumstances, not use the best material that is available to us; that is, one of the great morality plays of the past? Or should we create our own, even though it will obviously not be nearly so good? Well, Chesterton said, ‘If @ thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.’ And going further, I would say that that would be a good motto for the repertory theatre movement in general. Should repertory societies produce only what is accepted, and easy, and popular? My idea is that that kind of entertainment — the easy and the popular — should be left to the cinema, which does it so well. The cinema is economically bound to that kind of entertainment. There is no technical reason why the films should not tackle the greatest and most important of dramatic works, and very occasionally they do, but there is an economic reason why they should not. I mean, the demands of the popular boxoffice.

"But there is no such economic reason binding the repertory theatre movement. So I believe that the repertory societies should produce the difficult, the spiritually worthwhile playsthose plays through which an audience grows in spirit because its imagination is creatively aroused. The poet, Shelley, put this idea better than anyone when he said, ‘A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own, The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.’ "That is to get back to the old idea of the drama as something which ‘purges with pity and with terror," added Mr. Wadman. "And it seems to me that it is along those lines that the whole repertory movement should operate." SHAKESPEARE IN CHRISTCHURCH OR news of the Canterbury College Drama Society (whose moderndress production of Hamlet The Listener reviewed last year) we. turned to Ngaio Marsh, who was in Wellington the other day. , This year, this group staged Othello under Miss Marsh’s direction, and the seats for the whole season were sold out before it opened. The Little Theatre at Canterbury College holds only about 250-not necessarily in complete com-fort-but even so, it was obvious that (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) the Othello production could have filled a bigger theatre, Miss Marsh told us. "The prevailing remark afterwards was ‘One understood it all,’ Shakespeare became natural and real to, the audience, and they listened as they might have listened to a contemporary play. I like to think that we really need our Shakespeare. In the blitz in London they rigged up Shakespearian plays all over the place, especially the tragedies, which seemed so right at a® terrible time like that. "In Christchurch during Othello, the whole town was in a stir. I was walking through town one day and I went past a tajlor’s shop. The tailor came dashing outwith a piece of tweed over his arm when he saw me, and said he had taken his son five times, and could I possibly get him seats again. Well, exactly the same thing happened with an electrician. Personally, I think we must just thank The Bard!" "But the students really did work hard, and in the time they were working on it they did acquire some tech. nique, As far as possible, we used the methods of Stanislavsky, who was the G.O.M., as it were, of the Russian theatre. Complete muscular relaxation and natural-looking movements are the main idea. We had three acting levels, with the stage arranged so that acting was continuous-one scene going on in one quarter of the stage while a new scene is set up-as quietly as possiblebehind curtains on another part of the stage. Of course it’s much easier to make experiments of this kind with young people who havén’t done any acting before, and they really did make a success of it." We asked Miss Marsh if it was true, as we had heard, that the Canterbury College Drama Society might send its Hamlet and Othello on tour during the long vacation, and if it was possible yet to say so publicly. "Oh, yes, it’s true, and I think everyone knows about it I mean we've had so. many requests from all over. the place, and now some friends are coming to light with the necessary backing and ideas, and suggestions on the business side. Of course there are all sorts of things that will have to be dovetailed in, and there will be transport and manpower difficulties, too, but you might see us on tour, all the same, in the summer."