Whole or Broken English?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 449, 30 January 1948, Page 8

Whole or Broken English?

DIDN’T know that A _ Chinese Solomon, from 4YA, was a local effort until it was over, so that my judgment of it was unclouded by any tinge of patriotic bias. It was an amusing trifle, the sort of thing that has to be very well done if it is not to fail altogether. This

production, I thought, kept the narrow path between over-seriousness and a too flippant treatment of a delicate theme. When treating such a selection of charac-ters-most of whom were .Chinese-it is a problem how to represent them by voice alone, as must be done on the radio. When foreigners are supposed to be conversing together in their own tongue, this: should be represented by making them speak plain English} but had this been done here, half the "delicious atmosphere of the story would have been lost. The different accents were varied sufficiently to indicate each person’s character-the timid humble cook, the Vicious House-boy, and the senile and decadent old father (the latter voice, though very difficult to listen to, was horribly effective in evoking the picture of a really despicable old man), On thinking over the play, I decided that the Solomon-theme was not ~unhackneyed, that the play would not read as well as it sounded, but that the playwright knew how to get the best out of a radio script, and the deft and light hand of the producer had made it into something worth hearing.