MEET "GREGORY KEEN"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 912, 1 February 1957, Page 19

MEET "GREGORY KEEN"

OME listeners to the BBC’s recentlylaunched drama series, Against the Wind-which, one assumes, will eventually come also to the ears of listeners abroad-will hear some 24 works illustrating different concepts of | free-

dom, among them three speciallywritten new plays (writes J. M. D.

Hardwick trom London). One of these, African Interlude, has been contributed by Bruce Stewart, a native of Auckland who now lives permanently in London. This is Stewart’s second major play to be broadcast within a few months. His police drama, The Devil Is Driving, was included shortly before Christmas in the weekly Saturday Night Theatre series. African Interlude, whose theme is listed as "the bondage of circumstance," concerns a Colonial Office servant’s enslavemert by the official machine, of which he is a part. Bruce Stewart was born in 1926 at Mount Albert, where his parents still live. He describes his father, Bob Stewart, as. perhaps the best known taxi driver in Auckland in his day. His sister, Joy Knox, also writes, and is well known to the editors of New Zealand ladies’ magazines, Stewart was educated at Mount Albert Grammar School and St. Augustine’s, near Napier. After wartime service in the infantry he did freelance acting and announcing for the commercial radio and took club engagements in Auckland with songs and stories at the piano. He had some drama training under J. W. Bailey, and says he learnt much of what he knows from Alec McDowell, then producer for the NZBS at Auckland. At the end of 1947 he went to Sydney and freelanced for the ABC, He had leading roles in many commercial serials which became familiar to New Zealand mw ~_ >

listeners, such as Mildred Pierce, Kitty Foyle and Saratoga Trunk. He was best known, he believes, as Sam Greer in Dr. Paul and as Major Gregory Keen in Dossier on Dumetrius. On the Sydney stage during those years he appeared in such roles as Thomas in The Lady’s Not tor Burning and Edward in The Cocktail Party, produced Cockpit and Shadow of a Gunman, and was one of the founders of the semiprofessional company, the Genesian Theatre. He also gave more attention to his writingwhich in New Zealand had been confined to a few short stories-and made many adaptations of stage works for broadcasting. His own serial, Peter and Paula, which has been running on the Australian radio for several years now, is still without a _ foreseeable end. Stewart writes several episodes at a time and posts off a regular batch to keep it going.

With his Australian wife, whom he met in the Genesian Theatre, Bruce Stewart arrived in England in December, 1955. With three children, and a fourth on the way, they live at Chipstead, Surrey, in a house which, appropriately enough, once belonged to Hugh Walpole, who was also born in Auckland. Stewart’s career here is still very much divided ‘between acting and writing, a happy circumstance which enables him to live successfully as a freelance. He is -.

working on several radio plays and a television play, and is thinking hard about a play with a modern New Zealand setting. In addition to sound broadcasting he has made several television appearances.. If he has not yet had time to make his mark on television, it has already had its effect upon him. When I met him the long-cherished beard had vanished, in answer to the unarguable demands of. the camera. ; >