Radio Playwright

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 418, 27 June 1947, Page 13

Radio Playwright

hal HEN one finds oneself praising indiscriminately .the work of one writer because "it is so much better than most," it is time to sit up and take notice. So I roused myself from the little welter of satisfaction into which C. Gordon Glover’s plays had thrown me, and tried to look at them a little more severely, to pay them the wellearned compliment of serious criticism which so few radio-plays merit. Farewell Helen, a story of love and incompatibility, was from almost every point of view a fine piece of work. A slight flaw m production was noticeable in the delivery of the "interior voice" which, with the ‘radio tuned to normal, was inaudible. The plot was, I suppose, slight; by which I mean that there were no murders or sudden deaths, no violent crises, simply aman who finds his love for a woman incompatible with his own system of living and of values, and who lets it all end "not with a bang but a whimper." Slight then, if you like; but not unimportant. Of the unqualified merit of the second play (One Day in the Luxembourg) I am a little more doubtful. It is "the story of a genius whose conceit wrecked his life, and of his expiation." There is the same portrayal of a sensi-tively-balanced human mind, the same

mingling of fact and fantasy; but there was a rather more conventional treatment of the story which rounded off the corners and tied up the ends without making a more convincing play of it. Mr. Glover has a fine mastery over the extremes of extravagance and restraint, and he does not hesitate to use both; nor is he afraid to make full use of poetry and song in building up the structure of his play.