Story Reading
| ISTENING to Dermot Cathie reading J. Jefferson Farjeon’s The Twist from 2YA recently made me wish that we had more stories even if it meant having fewer plays. For one thing, there seem to be more suitable stories available for radio than there are plays (at any rate The Twist was much more dramatic than either of the plays I heard that week, Caligula Objects or Simon Curle) and how much simpler for a producer to cull a selection from A Century of Creepy Stories and hand it over to the local Kai-lung rather than go to the bother of casting and directing an Appointment with Fear, since in the former case the meeting should be even more effective. It seemed to me as I listened to Mr. Cathie that a much greater concentration of purpose is achieved by the solo performer, particularly when the item depends for its effect on the surprise ending. For listeners have been known to lose their way in attempting to follow the unseen entrances and exits of a diversity of characters, and when the final unrayelling takes place in the drawing-room
they are as often as not still in the pantry with the butler or in the summerhouse with the second. sleuth. This, of course, cannot happen when an experienced raconteur gently leads the listener (not by the nose) along the by-paths of the plot, seeing ‘to it that he duly circumvents all the twists in the narrative and making sure that he has his expected reward of being in at the finish. :
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19471107.2.36.3
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 437, 7 November 1947, Page 18
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261Story Reading New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 437, 7 November 1947, Page 18
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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