Classics Read Aloud in Public

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 342, 11 January 1946, Page 15

Classics Read Aloud in Public

GREAT uncle still living in Lawrence remembers the ~ time when reciters of ballads held large audiences in the diggings there. There was a time, too, in living mémory, when every shearers’. hut had its reciter of, the proletarian ballads, the Australians. with their Lawson and their bush ballads, and always someone who knew the complete "Dan Magrue" and "Man from Snowy River." ‘ Collaboration between the Auckland Adult Education Centre and the Auckland. Public. Library has resulted in a revival of these earlier recitals along slightly more sophisticated lines. Instead of Dan Magrue there is T. S. Eliot’s "Murder in the Cathedral," read by Professor Sewell, instead of "The Man

from Snowy River," a mixed grill of sonnets, conversations, and letters presented by A. R. D. Fairburn. The reading of poetry aloud being something of a lost art, the committee in charge. is faced as much with the problem of training readers through experience in the technique, as of training the audience to listen. Few have as natuval gifts the sense of rubato, the range and flexibility of voice (something different from elocution), and the dramatic sense. which good poetry readings demand. These can only be cultivated through experience. In contrast to the music lunch-hour recitals then, these will have to serve a certain apprenticeship. Sooner or later, the committee hopes, there will be readings not only of good --

prose and good poetry, but also of bad prose and bad poetry-the. stuffed owl and the spurious kinds-in the belief that one only has to read Warwick Deeping aloud to give him the raspberry.

J.F.

M.