CRITICALLY SPEAKING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 738, 4 September 1953, Page 5

CRITICALLY SPEAKING

Sir,-I should not like Bruce Mason to feel that his urbane and forthright review of Outward Bound was received by all his listeners in the way that L. Assheton Harbord’s equally forthright, if not equally urbane, letter shows it was received by at any rate one, Mr. Hatbord is able to tell us with the authority of a Contemporary participant that the play was a success 30 years ago. Seen today, rather than having, as Mr. Harbord asserts, "stood the crucial test of time," it seems to me (and to others with whom I have discussed the play) pretty poor stuff, Perhaps because we have seen in the interval better plays and films exploiting the "realistic" (if that be a proper term) treatment of life after death, we are no longer blinded by novelty of presentation to the pretentious shallowness of the content. Outward Bound may have in some measure prepared the way for Stairway to Heaven and Les jeux sont faits, but it is: not comparable with them as a work of aft. Nor, in my opinion, is it a good enough play to stand revival for its archetypal merits.

Mr. Mason, I agree, did not extend himself to explain the past success of a play that no longer seemed to him good. "That was not perhaps entirely fair to Sutton Vahe and his contemporaries; but, given the exigent limitations of radio criticism, he made in my view a justifiable and laudable decision to pro"test at what he felt was an unnecessary révival. It is perhaps ag much the function of criticism to stimulate the present as to be elaborately fair to the past. Mr. Mason chose to do the former and did it in a trenchant and eloquent .review that seemed to be wholly admir+ able. I hope the NZBS will allow us to hear more of him.

KENNETH

QUINN

(Wellington).