VENUS OBSCURED

New Zealand Listener, Volume 23, Issue 583, 25 August 1950, Page 17

VENUS OBSCURED

VENUS OBSERVED, by Christopher Fry; Geoffrey Cumberlege: Oxford University Press. English price, 6/-. HRISTOPHER FRY is probably the only original who is writing for the English stage at the present time. He hes put liveliness, wit and a cascade of language into verse form and has been accepted by enthusiastic audiences as a new and exciting playwright. His latest play has recently been staged in London with Sir Laurence Olivier in the leading role. It is, I understand, good box office. All the same, I cannot write with any real enthusiasm about Venus Observed. Compared with many other current offerings it would still, I suppose, appear as something out of the ordinary, but coming after, say, The Lady’s Not for Burning, and comparing Fry with Fry, I cannot help but feel that Venus Observed is rather like a damp squib after a full-scale pyrotechnic display. The former plays so dazzled us with their rhetoric, with the pace and flow of the words, that if we saw the faults, we accepted them as relatively unimpo*tant. The disregard for the ordinary limitations of the stage, the bad entrances, the feeble, often unexplained exits, the dearth of movement, did not (continued on next page)

BOOKS (continued from previous page) seem to matter very much, or they were at least secondary to the rush of resonant and booming language, and the audacious wit. In Venus Observed, however the language is less brilliant, more strained, the wit more spasmodic, so that the faults stand out much more clearly, and become at times irritating. The Duke, his three ex-mistresses, the son who has to, choose his mcether from among them, make a typical Christophe- Fry situation, but the theme becomes obscured and finally lost altogether in a mass of irrelevancies. There is still the occasional scintillation, enough probably to keep an audience in a good mood until the next one comes along, but not enough for the reviewer to accept as the real thing. It just does not quite come off. Christopher Fry is imitating Christopher Fry. Imitation, we are told, can be the sincerest form of flattery, but when the originator becomes the copyist, there is a hint of Narcissus. The original features are still there, but it is the flat mirrored image which we see in the pool, rather than the three-dimen-sional, vivid, living face about it.

Isobel

Andrews