THINGS TO COME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 530, 19 August 1949, Page 26

THINGS TO COME

Clash of Temperaments ‘THE interest of Showell Styles’s radio * play Crevasse lies in a clash of national temperaments. He presents the listener with an Englishman and a Frenchman whom chance has thrown together on a mountain in the Swiss Alps. The Frenchman js ebullient and voluble, shattering the Englishman’s nerves with curious yodels. The Englishman is a silent type and, to the Frenchman, an insensitive clod. "We simply recognise the fact that men of different nationalities don’t and can’t mix," says the Englishman, "Nationality? It is a shell, no more," retorts the Frenchman. The working-out of ‘this situation is exploited to the full by the three members of the cast--Pierre D’Argout as the Frenchman, Philip Cunningham as the Englishman, and Graham Tennant-as listeners to 4YA will discover when they hear Crevasse at 9.30 a.m, this Sunday, August 21, The play was produced by Rex Tucker in the BBC's North of England. studios.

‘Jane Austen | AN important contemporary novelist assesses the character of a great novelist of the past in a feature which was originally broadcast in the BBC’s Third Programme. Elizabeth’ Bowen ‘has taken as her subject Jane Austen, and in forming her judgment she has called on the evidence of two people who played an important part in Jane Aus‘ten’s life-her only sister, Cassandra, and her favourite niece, Fanny. Both of these characters are brought to life in the programme, and the well-known actress Celia Johnson plays the part of Jane Austen herself. Carleton Hobbs is the narrator, and the production is by Stephen Potter. Jane Austen, a New Judgment by Elizabeth Bowen, will be heard from, 3YA this Sunday, August 21, at 4.0 p.m. Fountains of Respighi [N the years he spent in Rome between 1916 and 1926 Ottorino Respighi composed his most significant pages and established his fame outside of Italy. Above all, in 1916, he brought out The Fountains of Rome, which remains to this day the unexcelled model of his imaginative sense of form. This symphonic poem consists of four parts, "Sensations" experienced by the composer while contemplating four of the most picturesque fountains of the city at an hour when each of them seems immersed in its own true light-the fountain of Vale Giulia at dawn, the fountain of Tritone in the full light of morning, the monumental fountain of Trevi at high noon, and finally the fountain of Villa Medici at sunset, Listeners to 3YA on Wednesday, August 24, at 9.30 p.m., will hear The Fountains of Rome played by the Symphony Orchestra of the Augusteo, Rome. This will be the first of four weekly presentations featuring Respighi’s orchestral music. Dramatized Stories EVERY week, with hardly a break over the past two and a-half years, listeners to 1YD have heard a complete tadio play produced by the MacQuarrie

Broadcasting Service of Australia. At 8.0 p.m. on Tuesday, August 23, they will be presented with the one hundred and twenty-eighth, and final, programme in this series of Radio Theatre, It will ‘be Ambrose Applejohn’s Adventures. But the session has been given a new lease of life with another series of halfhour productions, from the same source but on a different pattern. Theatre of Famous Authors will begin at 8.0 p,m. on Tuesday, August 30, with The Man Who Lost His Identity, an adaptation of the story by Hugh Walpole. Man of Devon, by John Galsworthy, will be heard on Tuesday, September 6, and on succeeding Tuesdays at the same time twenty-four more radio adaptations of works by noted authors. In each case the play will be preceded by a brief biography of the chosen author; thus in the narrative opening the first of the series listenere will\be reminded that Walpole "was: born in New Zealand in 1884, and his father later became Bishop of Edinburgh."

Through a French Window I { ARJORIE BANKS and Edward Ward, two well-known BBC commentators,.recently made a 2,000-mile tour of France with a recording car. They crossed France diagonally from North to South-from Rouen through the wine country of Chablis and Beaune, and the

industrial centres of Lyons, Genissiat, and St. Etienne, south to Provence and to the port of Marseilles. They met and talked with people in all walks of life, and the resulting programme, Window on France, is made up of recordings of some of their conversations, with linking narration by Ward. The people interviewed give a first-hand picture of life and working conditions in French towns and villages to-day, with their aims and ideals for the future of France. Window on France will be broadcast from 1YA at 2.0 p.m. on Sunday, August 28.

Footprints in the Jungle "WES," Inspector Gaze was saying, "that woman was mixed up in one of the strangest affairs I’ve ever had to deal with. She’s aged a lot; that’s the effect of living out East. But in those days she was quite stunning. She and Reggie Bronson used to ride in to the club every evening on their bikes, After her husband’s death she left Selanton, and I didn’t see her again for ages. I didn’t recognise her at first-not till she spoke." Somerset Maugham’s story Footprints in the Jungle, as adapted for tadio by H. Oldfield Box and produced

by the NZBS, will be broadcast from 2YA at 8.5 p.m. on Friday, August 26. The setting is Malaya, among the bridge-playing English rubber planters, engrossed in their club-life, their whisky-and-sodas, and the smouldering passions that are the trade-mark of a good Maugham story. "Tanah Merah is one of the few towns in Malaya with a history," he says in the introduction. "It was once the busiest mart of the Middle East. The Government offices are still the old red Raad Huis that the Dutch built when they owned the country. Chinese merchants live there whose families have been settled for centuries. It lies on the sea, and the sandy shore is fringed with casuarinas, It has the sad, sleepy, romantic charm of all places that live on the recollection of a vanished grandeur, . .’." Lundy and its Puffins UNDY ISLAND, which lies athwart the approaches to the Bristol Channel, is the home of nine people and the lodging of a handful of others-light-house keepers, birdwatchers and the like --and life for them is refreshingly simple in these complicated days. The island is also a paradise for birds, especially those fascinating little seaparrots, the puffins. Watching them flying fussily about their business or gatheting in lively crowds on the rocks is to see a whole world in miniature. The human inhabitants of Lundy can be counted among the blessed, for they pay no rates or taxes, they don’t have. or need a policeman, and there are no licensing laws. Listeners to 3YA_ will hear about The Island of Puffins (which was recently visited by thé BBC) at 9.22 p.m. on Sunday, August 28.