Spring, Sweet Spring!

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 792, 24 September 1954, Page 20

Spring, Sweet Spring!

‘WEET lords, fair ladies! We entreat your gentle patience while we tell of a new tale of Gloriana’s age, when Shakespeare wrote and Burbage strode the stage. Our scene is Shoreditch, the season . . . Spring, 1600. MLYN WILLIAMS’S play is an evocation of life among the players of the Lord Chamberlain’s Companyplayers remembered in their own right like Burbage himself, Will Kempe, Henry Condell, Augustin Phillips, Ned Pope, but made more famous by their association with their master-playwright, William Shakespeare. In Spring, 1600, they go about their daily business of rehearsing and playing, merry-making, too, with some of the greatest poetry ever written on their lips as they go off drinking and wenching. Around the adventures and mis-adven-tures of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Emlyn Williams has woven a thread of romance in the story of young Ann Byrd, daughter of Master William Byrd, the musician, of Ongar in the Kentish countryside, who runs away to London, disguised as a boy player. She attaches herself to the Chamberlain’s Men, ord is the means whereby they recover fortunes through the patronage 6f Oilsen Elizabeth herself, and "so enable the

Globe Theatre. to be finished building. The first production of Twelfth Night is a triumph for Burbage and the disguised Ann, who plays Viola. but once before she must resume her mgd s gown once more. Life for the players in the Lord Chamberlain’s Company was even more precarious financially than it is for actors today. Burbage’s men are abandoned by their patron, Lord Hunsdon, the tradesmen building the Globe clamour at Burbage’s door for their money, competition with the prosperous Admiral’s Men under Master Alleyn at the Rose Theatre is intense. However, in the Golden Age anything can happen, reversals of fortune are part of the stuff of life, and there is’ excitement in the air. Had not these people seen Sir Francis Drake "make a bow tothe Queen, go out one door, round the world’ and ‘in again at the opposite door, with another ‘bow’ "’? And always there is the promise of something more from Master Shakespeare, just come up from Stratford to his- house in Bishopsgate, dining at the Bell Savage Inn that night with Burbage

and bringing with him a whole act of his new comedy that’s "love from beginning to end." For the NZBS production a special musical score by the English composer John Hotchkis has been played and sung by an orchestra and chorus under the baton of Alex Lindsay. Spring, 1600, was produced by Bernard | Beeby, with Roy Leywood as Richard Burbage, Ruth Alley as his wife Winifred, Tohn Hunter as Tom Day, Paddy Turner as Ann Byrd and Bernadette Canty as Salathiel Pavy. On Sunday, October 3, at 2.45 p.m. Spring, 1600, will be broadcast from 1YA, and will be heard later from other National stations.