A Hero Called Clifford

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 448, 23 January 1948, Page 17

A Hero Called Clifford

HAVING listened to the play in 2ZB’s Radio Theatre on Thursday night, Out of the Fog, I felt I had paid my tribute to radio drama for the week, but I was lured into listening to The Fake (2YA) on Friday night by the fact that there were so many New Zealand repertory old boys in the cast. And The Fake turned out to be surprisingly good entertainment, largely because of the impressive dollop of villainy offered. There was far too little murk in Out of the Fog, the characters were all excessively above-board (the nearest thing to villainy was a restitu-tion-bent ex-murderer) and the play suffered from a heroine so wedded to sacrifice that when blindness threatened to cut short her career as a concert pianist she must needs flee her fiancé and thus deny herself the alternative career of domesticity. The Fake, though possessed of an equally virtuous heroine, had the sense to keep her rather more in the background, and gave histrionic prominence to’ a dipsomaniac, a murderer with the courage of his convictions and the accent of George Sanders at his most sinister, and an ageing baronet gilded without but hollow within. This dramatically sound trio acted with verve enough to wipe out the author’s initial mistake of calling his. hero Clifford.