OLD VIC FAREWELL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 493, 3 December 1948, Page 5

OLD VIC FAREWELL

Sir-There has been some comment on the opening of Miss Ngaio Marsh’s admirable compéring of the Olivier broadcast programme. She was understood to suggest that in respect to visits from theatrical companies New Zealand had been a desert, to whose inhabitants the Olivier season was something new. Naturally there were murmurs in which memory spoke of many such seasons in times past. I suggest that Miss Marsh said rather more than she meant. She had particularly in mind years immediately past, which have certainly been

barren. Unfortunately these years of a world twisted out of*shape’pile up, and generations have arisen that have no personal knowledge of the old life of free intercourse of things of the body and the mind, when one could travel as easily as one could buy and sell. Service in this country by theatrical companies from Britain, Australia and America, was part of that intercourse. We expected new flesh and blood entertainment just as to-day we expect new movies. It does not abate a jot of our ‘appreciation of and gratitude to the Oliviers to say that there were strong men before Agamemnon. It is noteworthy that when this little society. of ours was much smaller and poorer, it was well provided with

Shakespeare and classical comedy. In my centennial history of Wellington (1939) I said of the seventies and eighties that. "Wellington saw more Shakespeare in a given time than it has since unless we except the courageous enterprise of Mr. Allan Wilkie in recent years." H. E. Nicholls, lover of the drama and indefatigable amateur, recorded seeing twelve performances of Hamlet, with nine different actors in the "part, between 1875 and 1892, and seven of Macbeth between 1875 and 1883. Some Shakespeare plays were staged then that have rarely if ever been seen since. For example. I'am as certain as I can be that Henry IV has not been played in my time, which means, that we have not seen the real Falstaff, About the end of this period I saw my very first play. It was Julius Caesar, with an American actor named Milne’ in the lead. A few years later we had Henry V; George Rignold was majestic in presence and magnificent in voice. The screen version is the finest picture I have seen, but the stage production had its points. I cannot attempt to go over the various companies that gave us plays of all kinds in the intervening years. We were not served as well as we should have been-Shaw, for example, was almost entirely neglected for a long while-but we had many memorable experiences. In one year, 1912, we had Oscar Asche with Kismet and three Shakespeare plays; H. B. Irving (son of the famous Henry) as Hamlet and in non-Shakespeare parts; and Ethel Irving, a London star of high standing, in plays by Somerset Maugham and A. E. W. Mason. Besides visiting stars, we saw young players who were to make their name. Edmund Gwenn (the Earl of Loam in The Admirable Crichton) was

one. Of the then living players who provide the illustrations for my "edition of the Collins Shakespeare, at least ten came to this country. I have seen twenty-two of Shakespeare’s plays done by professionals, and twenty of these have been in New Zealand. Some of them I have seen several times. Of.the other two, one I could have seen here, The players who did ‘most for Shakespeare in this country, at any rate in my time, were the Wilkies. I am without a complete list of what Allan Wilkie staged, but the list includes ~ several

"rare" plays-Henry VIII, The Tempest, Much Ado, The Winter’s Tale, King John, Richard III, Measure for Measure, Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra. We should also remember Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson during the ‘thirties, and Fay Compton in the play about Queen Victoria. By then the legitimate stage was feeling more and more the competition of the screen and the pressure of rising costs. The old days in the theatre were good days. If the world recovers its sanity they will come again. Meanwhile we have our memories, and the last of these is of the Oliviers and their company.

ALAN

MULGAN

(Wellington).