DRAMA UNDER THE GUM TREE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 755, 8 January 1954, Page 13

DRAMA UNDER THE GUM TREE

TOWARDS AN AUSTRALIAN DRAMA, by | Leslie Rees; Angus and Robertson, Aus- | tralian price . 18/-. / HIS history of the native Australian ‘" drama arrives shortly after our one professional company, the New Zealand Players, added to its repertory Ned Kelly, a play by the New Zealander Douglas Stewart, the brightest star in the present firmament of Australian playwrights. The book’s general interest lies in the fact that the two countries encounter similar difficulties in creating (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) an indigenous drama and theatre, only ours are far the more formidable. In any colonial society vested interests, with much capita] at stake, naturally choose, in plays and players, what the great world has approved. Public preference for imported culture touches the theatre, and prejudice against local subjects as uninterestingly familiar has to be broken down. The writing craft is difficult, and pioneers in it tend to be over-seriou$§ and preoccupied with misery. It is easier to write passable tragedy than good comedy, and the public likes a laugh. The one Australian dramatist who has made a fortune in London’s West End, Haddon Chambers, exploited social and partly artificial comedy, and so did the New Zealander Arthur Adams in his one London success, Yet this book, well written afd illustrated, reveals a body of achievement that must surprise many Australians and astonish most New Zealanders. Compared with Australia, we have hardly started. In the middle period there were many successes in the school of rural melodrama, particularly in adaptations of such popular novels as Robbery Under Arms and For the Term of His Natural Life. Many. years ago in Auckland, I saw a version of Nat Gould’s The Double Event, a story with which I was deplorably familiar. Alfred Dampier, George Darrell, Bland Holt and others gave the Australians entertainment .racy of the soil and later there was the enormous success of On Our Selection. However, the cinema killed melodrama, and naturally there was a movement for plays more literary in style (an unsatisfactory term) and truer to life. Leslie Rees, who is Federal Drama Editor for the Australian Broadcasting Service, takes us through this movement, which was led by Louis Esson, to the wider opportunities provided today by radio and an expanding repertory world. Douglas Stewart has succeeded both on the stage and on the air. His Fire on the Snow has gone round the world and become a University textbook. There is a long list here of men and women (Ruth Park is one) who write serials for radio and plays for repertory theatres. Leslie Rees, however, has no mind to flatter the cause that is so dear to him. He ends by stating plainly what he thinks Australia needs in better craftsmanship, acting and _ production, before it can achieve a national drama in the full sense of the term. No doubt what he says applies to New

Zealand.

A.

M.