Prompt Ghosts

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 405, 28 March 1947, Page 8

Prompt Ghosts

HERE is a_ pleasant feeling of superiority in knowing something beforehand about what one is to hear, even if it is only what the man-in-the-tram tells you about the film you haven't yet

been to. So I settled down to listen to 3YA’s Sunday evening play, I Am Invited In, already prepared with my best spinal shudder. I was expecting the worst. "She Heard Feet on the Stairs," the programme told us, "And a Voice in the Room" (which might have been a Voice from the Prompt-Corner but wasn’t), "And She Listened." I listened too. It seemed rather a mean trick when the prompt followed the leading lady into the back of the car, but that was because I thought I knew already just what was going to happen. But I was wrong-the end came suddenly and unexpectedly and left us all gasping; we had our mouths open already, we were so agog to find out whether the author was going to Reveal All or leave us suspended in mid-air. He did neither; he dropped us. One question that did strike me rather forcibly, however, is the difficulty of dealing with the supernatural voice, particularly in* a play of that length, where there is not much time for the audience to get used to it. Making it sound like an over-efficient prompt seems to be the only way out; but the fainter and farther away the better, even if it does sound like something from a death-bed scene.