Play for Poets

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 402, 7 March 1947, Page 22

Play for Poets

CERTAIN unwieldiness of construction was noticeable in The Great Ship, Linklater’s fantasy of the Desert War, which was heard again from 2YA last Sunday. The action takes place, we are told, in the summer of 1942, before the defeat of Rommel, and swings in space and time between a small sector of the front line, where six men confront two German tanks, and a point some miles behind the German line where two survivors of an armed reconnaissance are struggling towards that amount of safety and security represented by contact with their fellows. However the transition from group to group was occasionally effected with devastating obviousness, by some unfantastic announcement such as "We are now moving forward in time, westward in space.’ Moreover the central concept of the Great Ship, which began as a mirage in the mind of Grenfell, and from there inspired the theme which runs through the play, was inadequately woven into the lives of the six men facing the tanks. Yet one net gain from what seemed to me Linklater’s lack of radio craftsmanship was his device of separating dialogue and description. He could, for example, say that the captain of the tank hung out, of the turret like a half-opened jack-knife without having to put the phrase in the mouth of 2 simple soldier on whose lips it would have been incongruous. The use of two off-stage voices militated against realism but aided understanding. But these are minor points. The play gave unlimited

opportunity for Linklater’s Elizabethan talent for words. The man who could fill a page (or is it two?) in Juan in China with lusty and riotous description of a belly can hardly be at a loss when he is free to pour forth in ordered disorder the images filling the brain in delirium. The rich spate of werds flows over us, but not so fast that we cannot savour the beauty and strangeness of the concepts they carry along with them.