The Knavish Sprite

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 351, 15 March 1946, Page 12

The Knavish Sprite

N eminent dramatic critic, speaking of past actors in the part of Shakespeare’s Puck, said with truth: "We all have our store of ghastly memoriesyoung and cockney, old and whimsy, fey and hoydenish." In all of these categories at once we must regretfully place the hero of Olga Katzin’s post-Shakes-pearean fantasy, "Puck’s Post," broadcast by 3YA the other day. The plot is briefly this: Puck, charged with the delivery of a letter by Oberon, and being unwilling to brave the Luftwaffe-infested skies of London, places it in a pillarbox and decamps. Various other persons have drifted up by the time a browned-off Puck returns, Oberon having taken a poor view of his labour-saving expedient and sent him back for the letter. The. _mortals, however, have by this time opened the box and the letter; it proves

to be an ultimatum of Oberon’s to. the late A. Hitler, warning him of particularly lethal enchantments which await his legions if they set foot in England. The mortals then disperse, uplifted in spirit and instructed in What They Are _ Fighting For; and Puck recovers the ‘ letter with a final burst of that Puckish laughter which one remembers at odd moments, always with a twitch of the nerves. I am afraid it will not do-even apart from a certain faerie facetiousness in ey¥ecution; the fact is that the Shakespearean Puck cannot be brought into direct contact with real life. The only mortal who ever got really close to Puck and his world was a weaver by trade; and he had to go somewhat more than halfway to meet the fairies, with certain concessions such as asses’ heads and, the like. I cannot see Oberon and Puck really joining the anti-Fascist front in any effective way; though such threats might come with real weight from Kipling’s Puck, who always regarded Oberon with supreme contempt, and with whom -a dark and shameful confession-I am _on far better terms than with Shakespeare’s.