Not the Whole Truth

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 802, 3 December 1954, Page 10

Not the Whole Truth

OMERSET MAUGHAM originally, I suspect, derived some of his power from the desire to shock. Reviewing his coolly cynical stories one feels that he is saying that there is good in the most outrageous of us and bad in the most conventional. The particular kind of honesty which he employs made a diverting comedy out of The Constant Wife (3YA), where the wife, shown her husband’s unfaithfulness, accepts it in a matter of fact way, herself arranging to take a similar course once she has established her own economic independence. The husband is horrifieg to see the conventions-for they are only conventions for this couple-swept away once the hitherto tacit understanding about their own relationship is brought into the open. As an expression of ideas the play is possible, as a picture of human beings, paper thin. But the point which strikes me about Maugham and other honest realists is that there is not much tension in their characters between the ideal and the real. The truth, yes; nothing but the truth, yes; but the whole truth comprises not simply the fact that "men are beasts" but also that they aspire to be angels. To remember that such is the case is to add a dimension to thought and a just richness to the human situation as reflected in drama. : Comedy Grown Stale SETTLED down to enjoy 3YA’s "Indispensables of Comedy," | which dealt with the "straight" man of famous comedy partnerships. The point is, of course, worth grouping a programme round, but once the session opened most of my attention was absorbed as it was meant to be, not by the sobersides in

the various pieces, but by the fun of the thing itself. How many, I wonder, though, will have found as I did that John Henry and Blossom, Clapham and Dwyer, and Flanagan and Allen no longer sound as funny as-they did Wears ago. Then you simply laughed, now you hear the laborious machinery of the joke turning over like the engine of one of the world’s first cars. Richard Murdoch and Arthur Askey still held their own in the uproarious scene where Askey, after a great deal of palaver, buys a swim suit to wear in order to pull his wife out of the river. And although I have listened again and again to Syd. Field being taught to play golf, and know every phase of that game with English idioms and _ golf language, it makes me laugh in anticipation as well as at the moment of impact.

Westcliff