NEWSLETTER from MALAYA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 770, 23 April 1954, Page 15

NEWSLETTER from MALAYA

| NVARIABLY charmed by a good performance, the music-loving snakes of Asia have welcomed the change from reed pipes to broadcast symphonies. According to Allona Priestley, a New Zealander now in Malaya, snakes have a passion for music. They will curl up on window sills, and sometimes enter houses, in order to listen to the programmes. Recently a speech by Sir Gerald Templar, High Commissioner for the Malayan Federation, was interrupted when a snake got into the works of the Kuala Lumpur radio station. Apparently the snake resented the interruption of his musical programme, and registered his disapproval in the most* emphatic way possible. This and other incidents of life in Malaya will be described soon in a regular series of programmes by Allona Priestley. Newsletter, the talks will be broadcast fortnightly in the Women’s Sessions from all commercial stations. Mrs. Priestley, well known in Wellington as a stage producer, is the wife of Don Priestley, now principal of the Maxwell Road School in Kuala Lumpur. She professes to have found Malaya so packed with interest that material for her talks has to be strictly selected. Even in her own field of drama, the place had -omething to offer. In one of her early talks she gives an account of the production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in Malayan costume. "The cast," she says, "was English, Chinese, Malay and Indianin other words, Malayan.? She was surprised at how easy it was to accept Macbeth as Sultan of the Malayan State of Scotland. The costumes were expensive brocades and silks in rich colours, all lent for the show by the Sultan of Selangor. Even Malayan eti-

quette was introduced. In the banquet scene Lady Macbeth sat apart while the men ate, girls knelt behind the men to pour wine for them, and the food was brought in on great golden dishes with gold decorations hanging all round, and conical dish-covers on top. Macbeth’s fight with Mactuft involyed Malayan bersilat — knife fighting, with elements of judo. : Malaya, Mrs. Priestley found, lives up to its reputation as a country where "luxuries are cheap and necessities cost the world." She describes the furnished service chalet in which she lives with enthusiasm, but gives the cost as 1000 dollars, or £110, a month. One cheap item, however, was coconuts. These grew everywhere in Kuala Lumpur. "They say there used to be a man who went round with a monkey, shouting, ‘Any coconuts to gather?’ If you had, the monkey ran up the tree with a rope around his waist. If you wanted green nuts for drinking, the man would tug the rope once, and if ripe nuts for eating he’d tug it twice. The monkey would throw down whatever was ordered." Malayan Newsletter will be broadcast from all ZB and X stations and 2ZA every second Thursday, alternating with London Letter. The first broadcast is scheduled for Thursday, April 22.