Dramatic Fluff

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 812, 18 February 1955, Page 10

Dramatic Fluff

OQHN PATRICK’S play The Hasty Heart is the kind of piece that might stand reading and seeing once on the stage as a light sentimental drama, but that hardly bears being met again. Under critica] examination, the thing teases out into fluff in one’s hands. I had seen it as a film, and had been mildly moved by the plight of the surly Scot in a Burmese hospital, who, in ignorance of the fact that he is dying, rebuffs the attempts of nurses and fel-low-patients to be kind to him. The NZBS version seemed much thinner, less psychologically probable and more artificial than I had remembered it. Why, when playwrights contrive situations like this, must the subsidiary characters be always pulled from the same pigeon-holes, as if all P.O.W. camps, hospital wards and drifting lifeboats were peopled by type-characters from a casting agency? However, I listened to it to the "heart-warming" end, because Roy. Leywood as the selftormented Lachlan McLachlan and Ria Sohier as his nurse played their parts with a conviction which gave their rather ordinary material a real dignity and charm.