A PROPER GENTLEMAN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 424, 8 August 1947, Page 15

A PROPER GENTLEMAN

New H.R. Jeans Comedy from NZBS Studios)

HE latest play to be recorded by the production studios of the NZBS is another comedy by the British playwright H. R. Jeans, entitled He Was a Proper Gentleman. This half-hour show opens with a scene in an explorer’s club -the kind of place where "anybody is likely to meet anybody’ -and an address by the club’s president. The latter /-explains that explorers are rather like | jungles, some are denser than others. ._ Take the case of Maior Edward Finch,

( for example. He has hied himself off to darkest Borneo, and has got lost. The president appeals for volunteers to make up a rescue-party. The listening audience then meets the various characters-more or less in order of their disappearance. The first rescueparty goes off, gets lost, and is followed at annual intervals by others. After 15 years, however, the major himself returns, in excellent health. But from that point the plot takes on a sinister aspect. The major puts up at an hotel, and the chambermaid assigned to clean his room vanishes, Curiouser and Curiouser , That brings a detective and a woman. reporter into the picture, with the explorers’ club president as an assistant investigator. Then the maid reappears with an extraordinary story: The major had attacked her and gnawed her arm, and now he is missing again. With horror the president recalls the major’s ambition to study cannibals’ habits at first hand. Has he returned from Borneo with acquired tastes? Major Finch is traced to the home of a country clergyman, plump Canon Archibald, but the major and the canon have gone for a stroll in the woods and only the major has returned. He is comfortably asleep upstairs. What had happened to the canon? And why did the rescuing parties, now drifting back from Borneo have unorthdox ideas about food? Listeners to 3ZB and 4ZB will by now know the answers to these mysteries, but He Was a Proper

Gentleman has still to be broadcast from 2ZB (this Sunday, August 10, 7.30 p.m.), 2ZA (August 17, 7.0 p.m.), and 1ZB (August 24, 7.0 p.m.). NZBS-produced plays, which have been drawing much favourable comment lately not only from New Zealanders but from Australian and American visitors, now aggregate about 40 a year, and that total does not include the many serials and educational recordings made in the Wellington studios.