"GREENHOUSE PLANT"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 751, 4 December 1953, Page 10

"GREENHOUSE PLANT"

AROLD NICOLSON’S "personal portrait" of Virginia Woolf (from 1YC) was a talk in which both subject and manner were perfectly congenial to the speaker. The portrait is exactly Mr. Nicolson’s medium, and he spoke here from intimate knowledge, with a combined sympathy and detachment which would surely have pleased Virginia Woolf herself. It was the kind of attitude to which her whole life gave a special value, whether in the lateVictorian atmosphere of earnest doubt, or in the high-mindedness of the Cambridge set, or of "Bloomsbury." And it was characteristic of Mr. Nicolson’s perception that he laid his finger on the weakness of all this earnestness and honesty-its lack of a sense of moral obligation. That is perhaps why it appears as a rare flower of a settled civil-isation-he twice referred to Virginia Woolf as a "greenhouse plant"-and not exactly fitted to the rough-and-tumble of a more turbulent age. She emerged as an inquisitive, civilised and fastidious personality, not a tragic one; yet there was something tragic about her stoic suicide in those dark days of the war: it must have seemed that the world she knew had lost its reason. Sound-track Voices T is not altogether fair to judge a programme (from 1ZB) based on the sound track of the film of Julius Caesar, before having seen the film. On the screen, there may be all kinds of subtleties in pointing and emphasis which the sound-track alone does not record. For that reason, the sound alone tended to exaggerate variations in styles of playing, which came out clearly in the scene between Cassius and Brutus, James Mason, as Brutus, spoke as a film actor, casually, "throwing away" part of his lines. John Gielgud’s Cassius was full and orotund; if anything, it went too far the other way-that muted tremolo in certain vowels-- but it did use the voice as an instrument. Louis Calhern’s Caesar seemed to strike a balance; so did Edmond O’Brien’s Casca-not quite unexpectedly, for although he has always played thick-ear melodrama on the screen, he has done so with intelligence. Marlon Brando’s Marc Antony seemed to be pitched mainly on a note of tight anger; but at least it gave ‘the impression of a man playing a desperate game of mob-appeal, and not of a popular actor favouring us with a well-known

recitation,

M.K.

J.