"Jubilee for Sir Jeremy"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 413, 23 May 1947, Page 11

"Jubilee for Sir Jeremy"

HE radio-playwright H. R. Jeans, in his "Jubilee for Sir Jeremy," has given listeners something really funny. The mental image of the stalking stone statue of a frock-coated Victorian gentleman is one which could reach us perfectly only by means of the radio, aided by the listener’s imagination. Told in the first person by Sir Jeremy himself, the story concerns the vicissitudes which time and circumstance inflict on a selfrespecting statue which has stood for 50 years in the public square, and now finds himself unwanted. Coming as it did from 4ZB, in one of the NZBS productions, this modern version of the story. of the Stone Guest was most timely and topical; those Dunedin listeners who have recently joined in the controversy as to what is to be done with the Burns-Chapman memorial in ‘he Octagon, may well pause and ponder over the story of Sir Jeremy, who wreaked a dire vengeance on those Town Councillors who wanted to remove him to the gate of the abattoirs. When Sir Jeremy (the whole six-feet tall ton-weight» of him) came alive and stamped down from his pedestal ‘like

the crash of doom, the incidents of his walk about the town were conceived in an entertainingly satiric vein. Rescuing his top-hat from the Mayor’s rockery, bringing to life first the Venus de Milo in the Public Art Gallery, and then a colony of stone dwarfs in a near-by garden ("off to Hollywood with you"), and defeating his. enemies by freezing the Mayor to stone, Sir Jeremy finally remounts his pedestal and resumes his stony silence to the plaudits of an admiring crowd. Also, I may add, to the plaudits of at least one admiring listener; I thought Sir Jeremy one of the most "alive" people I have yet encountered in any radio play.