Semi-detached

New Zealand Listener, Volume 24, Issue 622, 1 June 1951, Page 10

Semi-detached

SAT down to listen to A Winter’s Tale in a mood of pleasurable anticipation, tempered by slight regret that I had not been able to hear Mrs. Sullivan’s introduction. But after all I was tolerably familiar with the play-had we not done scenes from it for the School Concert?-and I was quite prepared to sit through three acts of Leontes (whom I have always regarded as an impossible and improbable character) for the salre of Perdita, Florizel and the hawpy ending later on. However I had reckoned without Shakespeare’s ability as a dramatist and the BBC’s technical resources. Given a Hermione who exudes warmth and charm as does Phyllis Neil-son-Terry then Leontes’ jealousy, hard to anchor in cold print, becomes possible if reprehensible. For all that, I managed to preserve something of my Habitual Listener’s detachment till the trial scene, when my regard for the niceties of probability was well and truly buried

Beneath an avalanche of Drama, stark and unashamed. After that the rustic idyll seemed a little insipid, the songs a little too self-consciously tuneless. By the last scene I was happily back to my old detached self, giving Leontes a mental push for his slowness in recognising Hermione, censuring Shakespeare’s male callousness in fobbing poor Paulina off with a second husband when, by merely deleting a stage direction ("Exit Antigonus, pursued by a bear") and some lines of inconsiderable dialogue he eould have restored to her the first,