Noises On and Off

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 545, 2 December 1949, Page 11

Noises On and Off

JT may have been We'lington’s boiste: ous southerly haywiring my aerial but I have seldom heard anything so strongly atmospheric as the NZBS production of J. Jefferson Farjeon’s Three Men on a Raft. On and off the record the wind howled, the principal characters spoke for the most part in the hoarse exhausted. whispers of those whom excessive and unsuccessful comPetition with the elements has robbed of all desire to compete, and I was forced to sit with port ear covered and starboard in close contact with the speaker. And though I am an advocate of intimacy in radio programmes, I have never felt that the listener should be called upon to embrace the receiver as closely as a crooner his mike. But any discomfort endured was in this case well worth while, for I have seldom met a radio play packed so full of the stuff of drama. Each of the three men relates the story of his most frightening experience--the thriller-writer was pursued by a madman who believed himself a murderer of the author's own creation, the fireman narrowly escaped death by derailment at the hands of a demented engine-driver, the Irishman tripped over the Devil himself in a haunted potato-field. All three dramatic insets were deliciously spine-chilling, and the last was told with a tongue-in-cheek wryness (and in a brogue as cosy as Barry Fitzgerald’s) which made it 97 ticularly good listening.