Voices of the Week
OT for a long time have I been made so aware of the many possible varieties in colour and texture of the human voice as by last week’s talks. Dr. W. B. Sutch, anatomising New Zealand living habits, seemed the perfection of ironical urbanity, an unaffectedly witty speaker, with something of the feel of a good tweed. By contrast, James Masterton’s reading of Irene McKay’s
charming tale, "The Threepenny Piece," revealed a rich Scottish voice, as friendly as a hearth-fire, as individual as a cairn, Marius Goring and Esme Percy discarded professional tricks in a joint reading of the beginning of Binyon’s translation of the Inferno, so that Dante’s beauty and terror and pity shone brightly through the English cloak. Maurice Duggan, that exceptionally gifted speaker, read his Diary of a Voyage with a word-pointing care that made the sentences sparkle like gems. I was struck this time, however, by something I had not noticed in his earlier broadcasts-what seemed like a conscious, if slight, echoing of Dylan Thomas in style and voice. Only the reader of the entertaining Confessions of a Postwoman disappointed me a shade, by a seeming unwillingness to surrender to the humanity of the script. But the patterns the radio voices wove this week for me were as interesting and as varied as those of a set of symphonies.
J.C.
R.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 915, 22 February 1957, Page 10
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229Voices of the Week New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 915, 22 February 1957, Page 10
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