Gallows Wedding

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 471, 2 July 1948, Page 10

Gallows Wedding

ITTY BROWN of Bristol, the Eden Philpotts play presented from 2YC on a recent Sunday, could hardly be described as a Fast Piece. She has, however, many good points, but her virtues are apt to be forgotten in the dreadful five minutes, each sixty seconds long, which intervene between dénouement and final curtain. The plot concerns an almost ex-highwayman, Joe Blackadder, a cheerful extrovert about whom there is nothing Starkadderish, and the efforts

of his old acquaintance, Kate Brown of Bristol, to save him from the noose by a gallows wedding. Third prop of the plot is the Bishop of Radchester, a saintly but gullible gentleman obviously due to be played for a sucker. Un-

fortunately Kate’s little secret becomes an open one from the first moment she opens her mouth, for no one who has as much as heard of the Widow Twankey can fail to pierce the disguise of that

husky contralto. However the premature revelation in no wise affected my enjoyment of the main part of the play. The scenes in the prison and on Gallows Hill are played with a matter-of-fact gusto, as if the 18th Century’s easy acceptance of the facts of life was extended also to the facts of death. All goes merry as a marriage up to the departure of the happy couple to their honeymoon at Bristol. And then comes the excruciating business of unravelling a plot already satisfactorily reduced to its elements by a perspicacious audience. It takes a long, long time, while we shift from foot to embarrassed foot, for the Bishop to catch up.