ANDROCLES AND THE LION

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 801, 26 November 1954, Page 21

ANDROCLES AND THE LION

(R.K.O, Radio) HEN, as a very young man, I wrote asking Bernard Shaw if he would clear up a point which puzzled me in something he had written he ended his reply by asking me to bear in mind. that."when I say a thing I say. that. thing: chit, and Caor Amey a quite different which may happen to be associated with it in your mind." Now, hang it all, not everyone has been personally rebuked by the great man, and I’m sure I deserved it; but for all that I looked back on that furrowed juvenile brow with a certain sympathy when I came to consider the film version of Androcles and the Lion. Not that too many brows need be furrowed over this film, which is very good entertainment, anyway. But how many will get from it what Shaw meant them to get? It seems a pity that his ghost can’t "be present to rub it in at the end as he does in the appendix to the play in print. The fable about Androcles and the Lion is pretty well known, and Shaw called his play a renovation of it. It’s the story of a Christian who isn’t eaten by a lion in the Roman arena because the beast happens to be one he had once done a good turn. Along with Androcles the play introduces several other Chris-tians-Ferrovius, a fire-eater at heart; Lavinia, a "clever and ~fearless freethinker"; and Spinthd, a. "blackguardedly debauche’-and some Romans, including the Emperor and his Captain. As produced by the late Gabriel Pascal (who worked closely with Shaw on other films) and directed by Chester Erskine, Androcles is a pretty fair translation of the original. Some changes were inevitable if the production was to be cinematic in style, and sure enough, though the story and much of the dialogue is unchanged, there have been both additions and cuts. Some of the results are good, but certain passages of dialogue will be missed by those who know the play well, and their loss will not make it easier for those who don’t to understand what Shaw is up to. As for the acting, the principal characters as played by Alan Young (Androcles), Robert Newton (Ferrovius), Maurice Evans (the Emperor) and Jean Simmons (Lavinia), seem very much the sort of people Shaw intended, In saying this ‘and everything else about the production (and I know

not everyone will agree with me about Lavinia), I should make it clear that though I’ve read the play I have never seen it on the stage. Shaw meant us to understand that a Christian was thrown to the lions not because he was a Christian, but because he was a crank-an unusual sort of» person. He intended his martyrs and his persecutors to belong not just to Rome but to all time. He saw his Emperor, "who has no sense of the value of common people's lives, and: amuses himself with killing as carelessly as with sparing," as "the sort of monster you can make of any silly-clever-gentleman by idolising him." And, writing during the First World War, he made a point about Ferrovius, too-the "honest man who finds out, when the.trumpet sounds, that he cannot follow Jesus." As I’ve suggested, without Shaw to underline we may miss much of this from our seats in the two-and-tenpennies; and because, considered as more than fun, this isn’t his simplest play, I'm not sure that it would have made much difference if it had been filmed straight, without elaborate sets and without cuts.