FOUR RELIGIOUS PLAYS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 501, 28 January 1949, Page 10

FOUR RELIGIOUS PLAYS

SEEDS OF ADAM, AND OTHER PLAYS. By Charies Williams. with Introduction by Anne Ridler. Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press. HEN Charles Williams died in 1945, the English religious drama lost an exceptionally original writer, Nine years earlier he had won success with Cranmer of -Canterbury, commissioned for the summer festival of the Friends of Canterbury Cathedral. The four short plays in this volume were written (continued on next. page)

(continued from previous page) between then and 1941. All were written because a producer wanted them, and three’ have been staged. They are done in poetry, with a mixture of elaborate imagery and simple expression, and the treatment at times is startling to the point of eccentricity. | Charles Williams was concerned with the conflict between good and evil, and to get his effects he manipulates Christian characters and personifications in a highly unorthodox way. In Seed of Adam, Adam appears with Joseph and Mary, changes into the Emperor Augustus, and orders a census of the whole world. A Negress representing Hell becomes midwife at the Incarnation. In The House by the Stable, Pride wins Man’s love, and Hell and Pride try to steal Man’s soul, which he has left lying somewhere as of no account, but Joseph and Mary arrive, and against Pride’s opposition, Man gives them lodgings in the stable. Pride and Hell slink away defeated, to re-appear a hundred years later in a knockabout morality farce called "Grab and Grace." Pride now goes under the name of Self-Respect, but is again thwarted. There is a touch of comedy in the Archangel Gabriel, and Grace is depicted as an impish boy concerned about the household accounts, the silver, and the dinner. In the end Man confesses’ to Faith that he loves Pride, and Faith leaves him with a blessing. It is clear the conflict is not over, that Faith will be needed in the future, which is in line with all religious. experience. The battle never ceases. Reading the plays is difficult at times, and it would be very interesting to see how they act, whether, for example, Williams’s method of hitting the audience on the head with apparent incongruity of character and thereby compelling their attention, helps him to put across his rather abstruse. moral ideas. There is enterprise in this field in New Zealand, so perhaps these plays

will be staged here.

A.

M.