How Green Was My Dolphin

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 470, 25 June 1948, Page 8

How Green Was My Dolphin

‘THE lure of the longer length has éven infected the world of broadcasting, and I discovered to my great surprise that" Green Dolphin Street, instead of being parcelled out into neat 15-minute instalments (and it would have made a goodly number of them) has been dramatised into two hourlength programmes, the first of which I heard from 2ZB the other Sunday. Now, though I could have enjoyed the programme better perhaps had I not been conscious throughout of my ulterior motive in listening, I felt it my duty to make viewsreel capital out of it since I must be one of the few persons in We'lington who have neither read the book nor seen the film. This then is purely non-partisan comment-I approached the programme free from bias of every kind, apart from that implanted by numerous other people who had seen the film or read the book or both. Green Dolphin Street struck

me as a good radio programme. It has a wealth of easily distinguishable and romantic characters (Marianne so crisp, Marguerite so sweet, Captain O’Hara so broguish). The conversion from

book or film to radio has been well done. (Good use has been made of devices for avoiding explanation of emotional states: "Sophie, you have dropped your ball of wool" gives us a concrete picture of what's, happening, and, more important, underlines Sophie’s emotional reactions.) The geographical solecisms that offend in book and film can here, in the smaller compass of the radio version, pass almost unnoticed, though one did tend to wonder at the long lines of kauris marching down to the mighty river, and to deprecate the rhythmic pants of haka-ing natives seemingly de rigueur as a background to William’s antipodean drinking. But my primary emotion was one of gratitude for what was in itsélf a good entertainment and which will have the effect of saving me the many man-hours needed for the perusal of the book.