DRAMA IN THE NEW QUARTER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 34, Issue 873, 27 April 1956, Page 17

DRAMA IN THE NEW QUARTER

2OR all play-lovers, Jacobean Theatre, a series of BBC programmes illustrating the main themes of drama in the Jacobean age, will be a highlight of Winter listening from YC stations over the next three months. Succeeding the popular Elizabethan Theatre, which has been widely heard during the past year, it will start from 2YC and 4YC on April 30, 3YC on May 2, and 1YC on May 5. The programmes attempt to show the listener, through excerpts from the plays of the time, how the age lived and thought, suffered and triumphed, and what were its beliefs and bugbears. Jacobean drama was a tumultuous affair. In three hours the playwright ran through the world, a new and yet unsteady world of discovery, hope, failure, glory and experiment. Everyone! who wrote seemed to have the gift of tongues. But it was also a sick time, obsessed by death and hurt by melancholy. Everywhere the plague carts creaked. and the preachers pointed, brutally, at the grave; melancholy struck men down like an influenza. The fact was that the Jacobeans, the heirs of the Renaissance, who had routed the superstition of centuries and explored

man himself, were left at the end of it all staring into the grave. Jacobean Theatre will start with Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Kill’d With Kindness, with Peter Ustinov and Griselda Hervey. This will be followed by Donald Wolfit in Philip Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts, Flora Robson in John Webster’s The White Devil, Pamela Brown in the anonymous Arden of Feversham, Fay Compton in Thomas Middleton’s The Roaring Girl, Beatrix Lehmann and Esmond Knight in John Forde’s The Broken Heart, and Robert Harris in Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger's Tragedy. Theatre in Moscow A second series of programmes which should interest all who love the theatre will bring listeners impressions of the theatre in the Soviet Union today, Last year a _ British theatrical company played in Russia for the first time since the Revolution. With the actors from the Old Vic" went Richard Campion, of the New Zealand Players, who was in England at the’ time. His observations on his visit will be heard in three talks which begin from 4YA on May 2, and will be heard from other stations during

the next three months. Mr. Campion’s study of Moscow theatrical entertainment revealed some curious disparities -between, for instance, the superblymounted productions of the Bolshoi Theatre, and the scant attention given to cinema; the vividness of the puppet theatre and the sense of a lost golden age occasioned by a meeting with Chekhov’s widow, the actress Olga Knipper. Plays to Come Plays to be heard during the coming three months will include next week (1YA, May 6) NZBS productions of Maria Marten and Box and Cox. Outstanding among NZBS productions soon to be heard from YC stations is Christopher Columbus, by Louis MacNeice. Other plays of special interest include from YC _ stations Sailor’s Song, by James Hanley, An Armistice with Truth, by Emmanuel Roblet, and The Confidence Trick, by Marivaux; from YA stations, Service, by Dodie Smith, The Gay Lord Quex, by Pinero, Golden Rain, by R. F. Delderfield, A Forest of Glass, by Peter Harcourt, and The Passion and the Pity, by Elleston Trevor; and from ZB stations, Random Harvest, by James Hilton.