UNKIND HEARTS AND CORONETS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 800, 19 November 1954, Page 7

UNKIND HEARTS AND CORONETS

ZBS Productions have two important offerings playing this week. From 1YA and 4YZ listeners will hear the New Zealand Players’ Company, under contract to the NZBS, in St. John Ervine’s comedy-drama Friends and Relations, and from 3Y¥C and 4YC Clemence Dane’s adaptation and translation of Edmond Rostand’s poetic drama L’Aiglon, the story of Napoleon II.

Friends and Relations was staged at Rublin’s Abbey Theatre in 1941. Although St, John Ervine has long been connected with the Abbey, and was a prominent member of the Irish Renaissance group, his work has developed on different lines from those envisaged by Yeats and Lady Gregory. With him, naturalism and objectivity, sometimes gay, sometimes satirical, began to find their place in the new drama. St. John Ervine, like Shaw, became indeed so much the Anglo-Irishman that many of his plays are untouched by "Irish-ry"’ altogether. Reviewing a BBC broadcast of the play in The Listener, J. C. Trewin calls Friends and Relations a "determined comedy about a will and its outcome, in which the dramatist all but tosses the fire-irons at some of his peculiarly selfish characters." The explanation’ of St. John Ervine’s particularly virulent studies of some of the characters in this play seems to lie in a long-standing hatred of class barriers and the way in which they reinforce worthless prejudices. St. John Ervine has also won a reputation as dramatic critic on a number of newspapers, notably the Morning Post and the Observer, while in 1928-1929 he was guest critic of the New York World. Ervine has written several books on the theatre, and in 1937 became President of the League of British Dramatists. Richard Campion, producer of the New Zealand Players, in one of his rare

pied a terre moments in between air hops from Kaikohe to the Bluff, found time to produce Friends and Relations for the NZBS. Leading roles are played by Michael Cotteril] (Adam Bothwell), and Peggy Walker (Mrs. Corken), supported by Ruth Alley (Kate), Delme Hope (Fanny Cairns), Diane Rhodes (Doreen), Molly Brown (Jenny Conn), John Hunter (Arthur), Charles Sinclair (Edward Scantlebury) and John Gordon (James Finlay). On March 15, 1900, all Paris waited for a great event, France’s greatest actress, Sarah Bernhardt, was to open in a new play by the romantic theatrepoet Edmond Rostand. Admittedly, Sarah was fifty-five and her part that of a boy of twenty-one, but she was the divine Sarah, and the boy--the Eaglet, Napoleon’s son, whose story has the same cruel, tragic charm for the French as that of the Young Pretender for us. Rostand was a poet with a burning love of his country. In L’Aiglon his theme is "the poor boy’s" passionate longing for his home and his birthright -France, The Eaglet, crowned King of Rome as a baby, was the only son of Napoleon and Marie Louise, the daughter of the Austrian Emperor whose armies he had overwhelmed at _ the battle of Wagram. The marriage was engineered by Metternich, the Austrian Chancellor, and Napoleon’s implacable enemy. When Napoleon's empire collapsed Marie Louise returned to the Austrian Court, where her son-"the

white Hamlet" he has been called-wag brought up as the Duke of Reichstadt. He attempted escape to France, but his own instability and physical weakness brought about his early death. William Austin produced L’Aiglon with Alan Rowe as the Duc de Reichstadt, Roy Leywood as Flambeau, Kenneth Firth as Metternich, and Davina Whitehouse and Paddy Turner as Marie Louise and Therese de Lorget. L’Aiglion will be heard from 3YC at 9.32 p.m. and 4YC at 7.30 p.m. on November 24, and Friends and Relations from 4YZ at 7.42 p.m. on November 27, and 1YA at 3.0 p.m. on November 28. Both plays will be heard later from other National stations,