"THE PEOPLE AND THE PLAYHOUSE"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 488, 29 October 1948, Page 14

"THE PEOPLE AND THE PLAYHOUSE"

NZBS Dramatic Broadcasts for March

NE of the special NZBS programmes which will be broadcast during the Royal Tour next March is The People and the Playhouse, a series of dramatic episodes illustrating the story of the English theatre from its earliest days. Intended primarily to provide first-class radio entertainment, the series will show too how playacting and play-going have always beén as important in the lives of most Englishmen as prizefighting or horseTacing, and how our drama grew from

the thoughts and deeds of living men, rather than from a cloistered academic tradition. The theme will be enlivened with scenes descriptive of personalities and events with which the theatre has been involved down through the centuries, and illustrated with episodes from great pleys of the past. The private affairs of the actors and _ playwrights themselves, their quarrels and financial ‘troubles, will form a more’ intimate background, with one character in each. episode unfolding the narrative as -a sort of personal. story, the passage of time being marked by a voice representing the Spirit of the Theatre. The first episode opens at a Whitsunday ‘festival in 16th Century London, when the city’s trade guild members are /putting on plays at street corners to entertain passefs-by. Henry VIII. himself. visits one group on;his way home

from church, and roars his approval of The Second Skepherd’s Play, a boisterous piece of knockabout farce and yokel humour that soon has the audience rolling on the footpaths. At its conclusion Henry hires one of the players to take part in a play that night at the palace, and listeners are transported from this Tudor. street-life scene to the Royal Court, and the company of Cardinal Wolsey and Anne Boleyn at a command performance of Thersites. Episode Two ushers in the Elizabethan era, a time of high adventure and intrigue when a_ playwright like Christopher Marlowe could also be a Royal spy, an atheist and a_harddrinking gambler. Extracts from Tamburlaine the Great, and ‘Lyly’s Campaspe are skilfully interwoven with the plot to show the kindof entertainment audiences enjoyed in those days and the next episode, "Exit Kit Marlowe," brings in many familiar figures

of the early Shakespearian theatre, Edward Alleyn and Richard Burbage, Henslowe and Hentzer, Dekker and Raleigh, are all involved in a hurryscurry of events that ends with Marlowe’s death in a fight at Mistress Bull’s tavern in Deptford. Extracts from Love’s Labour Lost and. Ardern of Feversham are included in this episode. Episode Four, "The Building of the Globe," starts five years after Marlowe's death with Shakespeare, the "upstart Crow" of a few years back, now "the greatest playwright in the world." The scene opens with Ben Jonson declaiming his famous panegyric-"He was not

of an age, but for all time’-and moves to Tyburn prison, where he is branded on the thumb for having killed a man in a duel. After a tiff with his miserly employer, Philip Henslowe ("I got an *‘undred better writers than you are, Ben. I'll give you a pound. There! And that’s generous."), he hastens to the playhouse. He becomes the friend of .Shakespeare, and after extracts from Romeo and Juliet and Every Man in his Humour the first part of the series concludes with the players discussing the building of the Globe theatre. Many months of research by .Tom Tyndall, NZBS scriptwriter, lie behind ‘these programmes, which are based as far as possible on actual historic happenings, and written in the idiom of their times. Succeeding episodes will probably deal with masques and the Restoration theatre, and will lead up to the renaissance of the English drama in modern times.