A New Elizabethan

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 547, 16 December 1949, Page 12

A New Elizabethan

THOR WITH ANGELS, a play by Christopher Fry; Geoffrey Cumberlege; Oxford University Press. English price, 5/-. (Reviewed by Isobel Andrews) HRISTOPHER FRY has been writing steadily for the stage since 1935, and he has béen directing and producing since 1927 with a brief interlude as a schoolteacher. His main series of plays has been written since the end of the last war. They are notable for their liveliness of wit as well as for their content and poetry. He has also a pretty taste in titles, as witness A Phoenix Too Frequent, The Lady’s not for Burning and now the play under review, TaAor with Angels. Thor with Angels was first performed at the Canterbury Festival of 1948. It tells of the impact of the Christian message of love and forgiveness on the war gods’ code of vengeance and the sword. The year is A.D. 596, and the scene is outside a Jutish farmhouse. It shows us the men of Cymen’s household returning from the wars with Cymen himself an object of deep suspicion because in the heat of battle he has spared the life of an enemy-a Briton and a Chris-

tian. Such an act is almost treason and Cymen is ashamed of his impulse, cannot understand it, fulminates against it and, to cast off such diabolical influences for ever, raises a cup to The sustaining sinews of tremendous Thor, The unwearying, turbulent, blazing loins of Woden .... But another toast springs unbidden to his lips. It is "Let us love one another." Sensation! His family no less than Cymen are aghast at this further evidence of what is apparently an unhinged mind. The play goes on from a boisterous and comic opening to a solemn and welltimed finale. It is written in one long scene without a break and should take about an hour to run. Some of the characters are people in their own right. Others are merely mouthpieces for Christopher Fry’s amazing flow of language. But this is all right because, planned or inadvertently, he gives some of the best poetry to the more or less static personalities, so that we listen to them for what they have to say, while the others, better etched in terms of three dimensional human beings, interest us for what they are. Technically the play should be easily playable, although there is a certain nonchalance about the way characters get on and off

stage. If the author wants them out of the way for the time being, off they go on the flimsiest of excuses, and when he wants them back again, back they come with the minimum of fuss and bother. There are very few "entrances." I don't think I have read a modern play with fewer stage directions or instructions to the producer, unless it was The Lady’s not for Burning. Christopher Fry says in so many words: "Here they are, the lines and the people to speak them; now you carry on from there’-though this statement must be qualified by saying that, in the best Elizabethan tradition, quite a number of stage directions are contained in the text itself. And it is with the Elizabethans that one is inclined to compare the works of Christopher Fry. I have no idea what he looks like, but a picture comes to mind ‘of a bearded chin and a ruff-this in spite of the fact that he is a modern. Ruff or collar however, doublet and hose or gent’s natty suiting, he will have a twinkle in his eye. He has the Elizabethan preoccupation with a God and with death, the Elizabethan delight in the bawdy phrase, the terrific pace, the spate of words which in certain passages Jonson or Marlowe would not disdain to acknowledge. Added to this is a bright, often jeering, humour (it is the Christian in "Thor" who is called the heathen) and an unerring sense of poetry. I would not say that he is a born dramatist. He is rather a born talker

with a highly dramatic flair for words. He has nothing that is intrinsically new to say, but the way he says it is different and exciting. His audacious and heartening muse runs through the current crop of slightly arid intellectualism like a high wind through wheat. There is a Wagnerian bellow that at once amazes and astounds, but for those who don’t like Wagner I hasten to add that there are some very fine passages for strings as well. I would very much like to see one of Christopher Fry’s plays. Well acted and well produced it should be an illuminating experience. Perhaps one of our dramatic societies might tackle it one day. But heaven help them if they try to elocute!