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New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 815, 11 March 1955, Page 5

Sir-So Christopher Fry doesn’t write good theatre! From what dizzy pinnacle on what theatrical Olympus does your correspondent make this astonishing assertion? New Zealand must take its plays as and if it finds them, but to make general assertions from this rather meagre evidence concerning the ability of the author is surely exceeding the bounds of reasonable judgment. The receipt of royalties from three simultaneus ‘West End _ productions should be some consolation to an author accused of being theatrically ineffective, but in case this recent. record is attributed solely to the high standard of performance I would add my own personal experience when participation in several of his plays in less exalted places brought no evidence of empty seats or lack of audience enthusiasm. Does The Lady lack point? For those who can’t taste the pill for the sugar I would suggest a restraining of assumptions until the opportunity arises of seeing The First Born, The Dark is Light Enough, or what may well be the greatest play written in recent times, A Sleep of Prisoners. Much of Fry’s poetical symbolism will be strange to New Zealanders, but this is hardly the author’s fault. The imaginative richness of The Lady was mainly responsible for freeing the English theatre from its wartime bondage of pseudo-realism. The commercial success of the play showed that poetry and pence can go together, thereby easing the path of such as Whiting, Hunter and Philp, whose work New Zealand may salen see one dav.

KEN

WHITE

(Tauranga).