An Invisible Export

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 509, 25 March 1949, Page 6

An Invisible Export

| (Written for

"The Listener’ by

HOWARD

WADMAN

HERE are several observations that might be made about the recent Australian tour of the Canterbury Student Players. 2 The bald facts of the tour are now common knowledge. Produced by Ngaio Marsh and under the business direction. of Dan O’Connor, a number of young people, most of them = students at one time or another of Canterbury College, toured for nine weeks in Australia with Shakespeare’s Othello and Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. In all they gave 40 performances and had a total audience of 20,000. Their work was highly praised by the critics, and in one city where they clashed with an English company also. presenting Othello the general opinion was that the New Zealanders had the best of. it. I should imagine that this is the first time in our history that we have sent a theatrical company out of the country (I am not prepared to count the Kiwis). So the first startling fact is that we now have an invisible export, so to speak, other than scenery. That export is culture. Dozens of theatrical companies have come here from Australia; we have just arrived at reciprocation. They send us The Maid of the Mountains and Arsenic and Old Lace. We send them one of the ‘most famous tragedies of all time, and one of the most important dramatic experiments of this century. Is there symbolic significance in the exchange? It would be nice to think so. Of course it is not fair to compare the plays presented by a university company with the offerings of 4 commercial concern whose aim is to fill opera houses. Nevertheless, I think it is typical that when New Zealand has anything to offer at all it should be first-rate. For it is true that this country is characterised by a seriousness which sometimes deserves to be called "high" seriousness. In moments of depression, one is’ inclined to think of New Zealanders as ; (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) being solemn and even priggish, but at any rate they are not usually shallow or superficial. Looking as an outsider upon the. two dominions I receive the impression that all the current fads of European and American literature and art are imitated-and brilliantly imitated-in Australia before New Zealand has even heard of them, Our reactions in these remote islands are notably sluggish, and we have hardly begun to create anything in painting or the theatre, but when it does come I believe it will not be slick or cheaply sensational. It will be solid, and it will be our own, This' is one of the reasons why our national theatre, when we get it, should not be afraid to give us the worksthe works, in this case, of such as Sophocles, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekov and Shaw. My impression is that the New Zealanders, like everyone else, will take the easiest stuff that’s going, if left to their own devices, but if offered the very best, a larger proportion of people here than in some other places will reach up and take it.

HE other things I want to say come tinder the heading of the University and the Drama. For some years it has been accepted that you cannot teach science entirely ‘from books and _ blackboards. It is not enough to read that some gas or other turns pink litmus paper blue; for conviction you must see it happen, preferably in your own hands. For this reason the colleges have laboratories and a good deal of apparatus. "When a university begins to get serious about the humanities, it finds that much the same conditions hold good, and that the prime laboratory of the arts is the theatre. Literature, Language, History, Psychology, Music, Diction, Colour and Form are some of the things that come to life in the theatre. This is where the emotions are educated; where the world of human nature is seen at closer quarters than textbooks allow, where all the arts can be studied hard at work, and where the brash certainties of youth are mellowed by understanding and pity. So the appointment of Ngaio Marsh as Lecturer in Drama at Canterbury College is a long step in the right direction. z= 2