Off the Chain Once a Year

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 417, 20 June 1947, Page 20

Off the Chain Once a Year

i Written for "The Listener" 1

by

DORIAN

SAKER

OW that the tumult and the shouting have died, when the streets are empty of youths in shirt-tails, when the bawdy floats have been stowed away, when the graduands have got jobs and the under-graduates have, one supposes, settled back into sloth or work, it is time.to examine this outbreak of carnival, this brief madness that frolics. year by year through our main centres. When I hear some self-righteous dignitary of society criticising the activities of university students, proclaiming loudly that this or that activity should be banned, that suth and such a publication was pornographic (the usual phrase is "an insult to decent people"), I cannot help but project myself back a span of 2,000 years and more, to the road between Eleusis and Athens, during the Mysteries: or I think of certain phrases in Aristophanes’ Knights, at which the intelligent Athenians laughed uproariously, but which it is not lawful for me to translate here. Or I think of the stately Romans during the mad week of the Saturnalia, washing the feet of their slaves. Or perhaps the medieval clerics hold the stage, with their Abbots

of Misrule-in short, I think of a hundred historical precedents for just such an annual outbreak of license and bawdiness, and I wonder that the students are as restrained as they are. In a country that has no carnival, where all places of entertainment are closed of a Sunday, though churches are by no means full, where drinking is done in dens behind closed doors, we are all the better for some gusts of irreverence into our smugness. We are the better for Pe

having our pillars of society lampooned and our political leaders caricatured. We all tend to take ourselves too seriously. The Public are Unimportant Of course, an Extravaganza, or Review, or whatever it may be called, has two sides--the public and the students. But it seems a mistake to consider that the public are of any importance. For while it is necessary, really to enjoy acting, to have an audience, these student shows are produced primarily for the students, and any enjoyment derived by others is incidental.

Few people comprehend the dimensions of student extravaganza as an undertaking. In some centres. and in some. years, the performances | are more ambitious than in others, but always considerable responsibility is incurred, First a script has to be written, a script that can be performed expertly enough for the audience not to

boo, throw tomatoes, or worst of all, get up and leave. It has to be cast and rehearsed: props have to be built (props which in these days may cost anything up to £150)-costumes must be made-a public hall has to be hired, against the competition of profes-sionals-advertising needs to be secured. All this represents an expenditure of seven or eight hundred pounds, and has to be arranged by students with little or no experience in business. Nothing Quite Like It If you have not been connected with an Extrav. show in some capacity or other you have missed something for which the opportunity will never occur

again. I have tried to think what it is that sets this one function of the University out above all others. Is it the fact that, held in the early part of the year, it gives lonely individuals a quick and painless introduction to a warm, fullblooded society? Is it the romances which blossom shyly at rehearsals, and backstage during the acts? Is it the age-old fascination of the stage, with its exhilarations, its grease-paint, costumes, and footlights? Is it the creative joy of a large commuhal undertaking in which each one of hundreds is co-operating and shouldering a small fardel out of a bundle? (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) I cannot tell. It is an essence distilled from all this, which intoxicates from the casting meeting to the last hour of the last show; which we can seek afterwards in a thousand quarters, and never find, because the time for it has slipped, like smoke, through our unwary fingers. I often wonder why the public, so obviously incidental to the piece, are such patient patrons of student mirth. Why do they come, year after year, submitting themselves voluntarily to the danger of braining by a saveloy hurled joyously from the Gods, or of being knocked down by a youthful Jehu riding a motor-bike up the aisle? How do they endure the same lame puns and the same lampoons, the same perennial pornography and buffoonery? "A Casting Out of Inhibition" The answer must be that they like it. It is for them, as well as the actors, a casting out of inhibition. I have seen respectable gentlemen roaring with laughter at a s.ring of doubles entendres, and old ladies giggling salaciously at what would shock their grand-daughters. And it happens nowhere else-this re--versal of tradition-shoutings in the intervals, leaping from the pit on to the stage, and interjections freely scattered : through the playing. We have never experienced what happened once in London, when the play Young England was so bad that it would not have lasted a week, had a man on the second night not made a humorous interjection whicl brought the house down. After which it became the fashion to go merely to interject and listen to others doing likewise, on which basis the play ran for two years. Nowhere else do such things happenthe outrageous, the comic, the inane. Nowhere else can the uncomely spread of a civic nabob be so brutally pilloried, or the dropped "h" of a political chief be travestied. And all this is manna to a people surfeited with repertory and professional mediocrity. On the Stage You may have noticed, too, the predominance in student activity, of the haka party. Doubtless the hakes which they chant are spurious and set the bloodthirsty old Rangi-haeatas and Rauparahas a-turning in their graves, but it is an involuntary tribute to another and more primitive culture, grounded on the same terrain. For all these things, then, I salute the Dionysian God of Extravaganza. He may cause trams to be lifted from their tracks, he may imspire law-suits and police action, and parents to snatch their daughters away from the seats of higher learning, but his divine frenzy*is more | precious than gold. Like Charles Lamb, | I reluct at the inevitable course of des- | tiny, and mourn nostalgically for the old | days-but who am I to complain, I who | in my time have played ‘the parts 4 Captain Rook, of Tweedlesid) of a White Ant, and the nether regions of a moa! -_-_-_-ooCOOOOOOO OO