Emotional X-Ray

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 468, 11 June 1948, Page 8

Emotional X-Ray

FTER hearing one of C. Gordon Glover’s plays I always wonder with a shiver whether he is as good at seeing through his friends as he is at seeing through his characters, whether his wife suffers the same remorseless dissection as he accords his heroes’ fiancees. What takes it so much worse is that C, Gordoh Glover never lets bygones be bygones (if Mr. Dunne had not formulated his time theories Mr, Glover would have probably worked something out for himself); and not only gives his characters a past but never lets them forget it. Last time I listened to Mr. Glovér he was engaged in persuading his hero to bréak his engagement (a task in which he was completely successful), this time (This is Different, 2YA, May 26) he spends haif-an-hour getting afiothet hero hitched. And how satisfactorily! From the opening moment, when, at a café table, he whispers, "This time it’s different’ doubts pursue him like the Etimenides, doubts that take to themselves the forms and voices of the women to whom he has murmiifed these very words; and Mollie, Penelope, Susan, Mary and one or two rank out- | Siders assail him not only singly but in concert. Finally, Susan, the most persistent (and definitely the nicest), is Suitably exorcised, and a chastened Michael may be presumed somewhat tore fitted for marriage with his Diana. Mr. Glover’s love stories are about as different from the usual magazine type as he is from Dorothy Dix, but if you have a love-problein better jet it rest on Miss Dix’s bosom than submit-it to the zestful scalpel of Mr. Glover.