THE WHITE WHALE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 664, 28 March 1952, Page 8

THE WHITE WHALE

ITH Henry Reed's adaptation of Moby Dick, NZBS _ play production may be said to have entered into its maturity. Perhaps the most ambitious piece the Auckland studios have ever attempted, Moby Dick was a triumphant success, a powerful work, confidently and imaginatively handled. There were no weaknesses either in William Austin’s direction or in the playing of the large cast. Dennis Eves was a convincingly obsessed Ahab, rather. quiet, I thought, to begin with, but rising splendidly to the demands of the later scenes, Patrick Smyth's justly righteous Starbuck, Peter Gwynne’s melancholy Ishmeel, Eddie Hegan’s sagacious "Manker," and Barbara Seott’s iping Pip were excellent, As Father apple, Ernest Blair, with his rich, measured tones, conveyed the sense of destiny without fatalism which dominates the -boek. Music and flawless sound effects joined with the poetry of the dialogue to create in the mind both the concreteness and the "otherness" of Melville’s pictures. How faithful is this play to Melville’s titanie novel? It is not so much an adaptation as a work which Reed has uarried out of tht richness of Moby ick, It is, in fact, a "reading."’ Henry Reed has boldly made up his mind that the great white whale is not a symbol of evil, but "the face and the unques-

tionable judgment of God." As he writes, "Melville’s own cry ... is that it is not man’s part in life to strike out, or to tebel against God’s judgment. Ahab is the arch-rebel; and that is fatality and tragedy." He has selected and arranged his material to bring this out. One result is that the Shakespearian quality of Melville’s language and tragic vision, to some extent veiled in the novel, is heightened. The intensity of the NZBS playing ensured that the right level of significance was reached, One serious criticism can, I think, be made of the NZBS praduction. In its own right, Reed’s play is a work of art, a masterpiece of radio writing, in which every point tells. To compress the work into two hours (Why?), several cuts were made. Two of these could be justified, but the dropping of the first day’s pursuit of Moby Digk was, to my mind, indefensible. Each day forms part of the climax for which all the previous action has prepared us. Reed himself says, "It would seriously violate Melville to reduce them to a single episode or eyen a double one." Yet this is just what was done, so that, grand though the final scenes were, their total effect was weakened, I feel, also, that a listener who did not know the book might. not realise that Ahab dies by the flying turn of the. harpoon line. catching round his neck, This weakness is, however, in the script, one of the few problems Reed did not quite solve, But a startling and gratuitous change was the substitution of the word "women" for the last word in Bildad’s "If you touch at the islands, beware of fornication." After all, we haye been given The Canterbury Tales virtually unbowdlerised, Such points may seem trivial, but it is a measure of the quality of the NZBS Ns

ews production that we should wish for perfection. Moby Dick is a milestone in New Zealand radio, an unforgettable interpretation of a great work, capturing the beauty of its symbolism, the fire of its vision and the exciting crescendo of

its story.

J.C.

R.