DUMAS' "MONTE CRISTO" FROM 3YL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 392, 27 December 1946, Page 15

DUMAS' "MONTE CRISTO" FROM 3YL

New BBC Serial Next Week

RODUCED as a serial in 12 episodes by the BBC, The Count of Monte Cristo is to be heard from 3YL Christchurch, Starting on Friday, January 3. Later, it will be heard from other stations. There is first-class material for broadcasting in this classic of Alexandre Dumas pére, and the difficulty which faced Patrick Riddell, the adaptor, was to decide what could be left out, in imposing the rigid time limits of the redio serial form on such a monumental novel. But Riddell, and Martyn C. Webster, the producer, spared no pains to make it a memorable production. ' Webster was given a strong castGlen Byam Shaw, taking his first important part since his return from the army, plays Edmond Dantes, and Marjorie Westbury plays Mercedes. The

linking passages in the story are read by Valentine Dyall (the "Man in Black" of the BBC Appointment with Fear stories). British listeners heard the serial at the end of last year. Before the first episode itself, there will be an introductory talk (beginning

at 8.15 p.m.) given by Monckton Hoffe, the dramatic author. He will discuss the extraordinary character of Dumas himself, whose own Jife provided enough startling material to make another novel. After The Three. Musketeers and Monte Cristo had brought him into European fame, Dumas did not go on writing masterpieces. He turned himself into a factory. "If sé many thousand people are rendered happy by reading me," he is reported to have said, "why not make many | more thousands happy by thinking that they are reading me?" | So he engaged hack writers to help him, touched up what they wrote, and put his name to it all. And he got away with it for a time, but eventually the "public found out. Dumas subsequently went down in a welter of unpaid bills,

for in the good days he had squandered his vast fortunes as fast as he made them. This production was Glen Byam Shaw’s first radio appearance since his discharge from the army, and when he was first invited to take the part, he was reminded of a coincidence. Before he left England for service overseas with the Royal Scots, he paid a farewell visit to his young son at school, and bought him a book as a*memento of the occasion. He had not read it himself, but he thought his son would like it. It was Monte Cristo. Last year, when he knew he was to play Dantes on the air, he borrowed the book from his son. Shaw’s association with radio goes back to the earliest days of the BBC. His last stage appearance before the war was at Elsinore in Denmark, where he played Horatio in an English performance of Hamlet. Mercedes is played by Marjorie Westbury, who made her name in the early days of broadcasting as a singer. She once sang a boy treble’s song in a programme broadcast overseas and was greatly tickled to receive a letter from a woman in New Zealand, saying "My little girl sings too. How old are you?" If that same listener can get 3YL on her radio, she will hear Marjorie -Westbury’s speaking voice in Episode 8, which brings Edmond Dantes face to face again with Mercedes,

When The Count of Monte Cristo was broadcast in Britain, many letters came to the BBC from people who wanted to know the name of the tune that opens and closes each episodeit comes from Vaughan Williams’s incidental music to Aristophanes’ play The Wasps. .