The Stimulating Past

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 655, 25 January 1952, Page 10

The Stimulating Past

HE number of historical plays broadcast recently suggests that script-writers are now finding the past as stimulating as crime and fantasy. During the past week I heard three lengthy historical plays, each good, but together rather too uniform a diet for the period. Hugh Ross Williamson’s Queen Elizabeth, as one might expect from this shrewd delver into historical episodes still coloured in the popular mind by Whig prejudices, was a fine study of the complex Queen, with the great Edith Evans at her imperious best in the title-role. Right Well Beloved Lady, a piece based loosely on the Paston Letters, and telling of Marjorie Paston’s steadfast love for the family bailiff, was treated as a romantic affair, well enough done, but giving us little of the feel of the times. In The Other Heart, an NZBS production which I thought compared very favourably with the BBC offerings, some of Auckland’s best players lent their agreeable talents to a somewhat idealised version of Francois Villon’s youthful) escapades, which was chiefly remarkable for its scant treatment of Villon’s poetry. Listening to these, I felt that radio historical plays afe still at the "period fiction" stage, and that out of this group, only Queen Elizabeth came near that combination of historical accuracy and insight with human interest which Alfred Duggan, Patry Williams and Hope Muntz have achieved tecently in the novel.