THE PLAYERS' "ESCAPADE"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 818, 1 April 1955, Page 19

THE PLAYERS' "ESCAPADE"

T’S always an agreeable surprise to see a new play that succeeds at two important levels-that’ entertains all. the way with a lively, suspenseful, amusing story and at the same time discusses wittily, and sometimes even wisely, ideas about such topics as the bomb and pacifism, man-woman relations, education and modern journalism. Roger MacDougall’s Escapade, which Richard Campion’s New Zealand Players have chosen for their new season, is such a play, and I shall be surprised if it doesn’t please large audiences throughout the country. The mainspring of the action-and the forerunner of even bigger and better things-is an outbreak of violence at a boarding school, in which the sons of a pacifist author are involved. The boys are never seen: their escapade) is felt through their father, John Hampden, and his wife, their headmaster, a couple of schoolboys, a reporter and one or two others. To thicken the plot, Mrs. Hampden is trying to make up her mind to leave her husband because he is too busy with good causes to give her or the family any attention. It’s no reflection on the rest of the cast to say that the play's best scene is one in which a _. young schoolboy ostensibly "comes clean’ to his headmaster about his part in the escapade. This well-written part is played in an

engagingly natural way by Lyn BrookeWhite, and along with the next development, : when Geoffrey Wren’.as an older, boy ereates for ‘the Hampdens a pictire of the almost legendary figure their eldest. son has become, it makes this second. act as a whole the most consistently sincere in the play. Mr. Wren, by the way, does a finely sensitive job in the last act. also. These questions. of consistency and sincerity are at the heart of my one small criticism of the play and the production. My feeling is that Mr. MacDougall’s attitude towards ideas entertains rather more than it persuades, and every now and then I was troubled by what a programme note called the plays "rare combination of near-farce and drama"-so troubled, in fact, that I went to see it a second time. I have a faint suspicion that there were doubts on the other side of the footlights, too-for one thing, Gay Dean’s playing of the mother (the most difficult and emotionally subtle part in the play) has some passages that are self-conscious and (in the wrong sense) almost theatrical. We know she can do better. I personally enjoyed e play much more the second time by looking for a straightforward interpreta-tion-one, that is, which ignores any inclination towards farce. It’s on that level that we can say that Roy Patrick plays Hampden with impressive strength and ease, and Briton Chadwick the headmaster with suitably solemn conviction. Of the rest I liked best Helen Stirling, as the voice of wise old age, though Bernard Shine, Charles. Sinclair and Pamela James earn honourable mention. The décor by Raymond Boyce, one must add, is of the usual high standard.

F.A.

J.