Artistic Propaganda

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 445, 2 January 1948, Page 7

Artistic Propaganda

ROPAGANDA usually has to dispose of the listener resistance it generates before it can get its message across, because no matter how worthy the cause advertised we tend to resist dictation. But to me Wang Fu’s Family, which 2YA broadcast on a recent Monday in their CORSO appeal, was a triumphant exception, The play was beautifully written, the production almost flawless, with many moments of artistic rightness, as in the passage where Wang Fu’s wife, standing in the doorway of the hut, recites a few lines of a poem on evening which sounded to this ignorant person like something by Arthur Waley out of Li T’ai-po. But it will succeed as propaganda not because of- its artistic merits, but because it is one of the few attempts made to "sell" any kind of new order in terms of the old. Any person who has China’s welfare at heart must approve of Indusco, but many of us temper out looking forward with an occasional wistful backward glance at the Old China whose superficial graces were made familiar to us in song and story. Wang Fu’s Family succeeds because it convinces us that we can have our cake and eat it too. By the simple device of allowing his Chinese Indusco organiser to quote Confucius and refer to himself as "this miserable person" author Tyndall has succeeded in convincing us that we can build a new China using the best bricks salvaged from the old.