"THREE MUSKETEERS" DRAMATISED

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 818, 1 April 1955, Page 7

"THREE MUSKETEERS" DRAMATISED

]N 1851 when Napoleon III restored the Empire, two of France’s most famous authors decided to holiday in Belgium. They were a staunch republican named Victor Hugo and the. illegitimate son of a mulatto general from San Domingo named Alexandre Dumas. But, says one of Dumas’s biographers, "the difference was that Hugo was fleeing before a tyrant, Dumas before the bailiffs." Without delving too deeply into Dumas’s psychic processes we can see why bailiffs and their employers seldom play a role of unqualified nobility and heroism in Dumas’s work while contrariwise, anyone who is long on heroism and nobility ‘seems remarkably short on crowns and pistoles. For instance, take the gallant D’Artagnan and his landlord, M. Bonacieux. The latter, through miserliness and sharp practice, no doubt, has acquired a fortune and a pretty wife; the youthful D’Artagnan has little more than 14 crowns and a 14-year-old horse of a yellow colour "very well known in botany but until the present time very rare in horses." But while D’Artagnan has all the swashbuckling courage and agility of Douglas Fairbanks (whom in many ways he resembles) M. Bonacieux is a loutish shopkeeper addicted to underhand prac- tices. For instance, this poltroon tries to get the hero to find the abducted Mme. Bonacieux by blackmailing him with the fact that he has never paid any rent. Out of his generous heart, D’Artagnan pro-

mises to do this; and also to get M. Bonacieux out of prison where he is wrongfully flung. With a thrust here, a cut there, puncturing a lung one day, piercing a heart the next, the courageous D’Artagnanaided by his equally gallant comrades Porthos, Athos and Aramis-finally redeems the first half of his promise by rescuing Mme. Bonacieux, and at the same time saving his Queen from a fate worse than death, namely, going off ta live in England with Buckingham. It is only a pity that what with one thing and another (the other thing being his falling in love with Mme. Bonacieux) D’Artagnan overlooks the second half of his promise to M. Bonacieux. A condensed, recorded version of The Three Musketeers, with (of course!) Douglas Fairbanks Jnr. playing D’Artagnan, will be heard from 1XH at 9.4 p.m. on April 4, and later from other YA and YZ stations. Two other plays (BBC productions) will also be heard this week. The Story of Eugene Onegin tells of a philanderer, dandy, gambler, and man of ‘the world who is left a country house by his uncle and goes there intending to avoid the local provincial society. He returns the love of Tanya Larin only when she is out of his reach, and kills his best friend in a duel (an ironic circumstance in that Alexander Pushkin, who wrote the originel long poem, Eugene Onegin, was himself killed in the same fashion).

Pushkin’s poem was a long, vivid and lyrical "novel in verse,’ possibly the finest Russian long poem, which inspired Tchaikovski’s famous opera and was itself originally conceived in part imitation of Byron’s Don Juan, that bored and dissolute hero who, with his fellows like Childe Harold, caused "Byronic’"’ to pass into currency as an adjective. Onegin is played by Denholm Elliott and Tanya Larin ‘by Maxine Audley. In .First. Person Singular, adapted from the play by Lewis Grant Wallace, a famous author agrees to exchange manuscripts with a young, unknown and penniless writer who enters his life in ----

tragic circumstances. Part of the play’s charm can be attributed to its picture of the English country home and life of Henry Beringer who, in his eightieth year, is about to publish another novel. Malcolm Graeme plays the part of Henry Beringer, Margot Boyd that of his wife Amy, and Lewis Stringer that of David Brown, the penniless unknown. The Story of Eugene Onegin will be heard from 1YA at 9.15 p.m. on April 4, from 4YZ at 9.42 p.m. on April 6, and later from other YA and YZ stations. First Person Singular will be heard from 1YC at 10.0 p.m. on April 6 and later in the other centres from the YAs and YZs. --