Too Much Agony

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 480, 3 September 1948, Page 13

Too Much Agony

AFTER my constant eulogies of BBC productions, it is disappointing to have to say that I found one of them not up to the usual high standard. It was an ambitious rendering into radio J. M. Synge’s Irish play Riders to of the I came to the conclusion that 3 TE 4 ; : ( j the must have in play itself. It is many years since I read

anything by Synge, but I seem to recall that I once thought -him a dramatist of power and beauty, After hearing this radio presentation of one of his plays, I can’t agree altogether with) my former findings. Riders to the Sea is set on an island off the Irish coast, and from beginning to end it is just one long banshee wail. It has more deaths than Hamlet, but Synge is not Shakespeare, and his killing off of eight (or was it nine?) stalwart men, including an old woman’s six healthy sons, gave an effect of agony piled on too thickly. When this series of death by misadventure is told in the thickest of Irish accents and the most "poetic" of circumlocutory Irish dialégue, one is forcibly reminded that unrelieved gloom, tended-a desire to leugh unfortunately succeeds the imitial pity and horror. With this play the BBC company struggied manfully. But how could even the pleyers take seriously such things as the old woman's complaint about the difficulty of living without the ber sons, and her would now have to exist on a bit of bread-"Or maybe a morsel of fish, and it stinking!" i