Speech is Silver

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 915, 22 February 1957, Page 11

Speech is Silver

O one could take exception to the sentiment expressed by Mr. Harkfast, principal character of J. B. Priestley’s play, The Golden Entry. He is a man in whose reality we would all wish strongly to believe; a man devoted to the rearing and nursing of talent, who believes, as in a faith, in the power of the human spirit to keep a lamp alight in ‘a world darkened by the grossness of self-satisfied materialism. These views MHarkfast expresses with the grumpy eloquence for which Priestley himself has become celebrated; they might have been lifted word for word from his Thoughts in the Wilderness series which appeared last year in the New Statesman and Nation. But the play as a whole fails because the. characters are at once too clear in outline and too thin in texture, and their operations on each other are shown sentimentally, as either very much for Harkfast and his world, or equally strongly against. The play takes place in Burmanley, which Priestley has visited before in other plays. It is the very home of the smug burgeoisie, and whether this smugness can be pierced or not by the preux chevaliers of the spirit, is something which Priestley leaves it to us to decide. The Golden Entry gives us at least some hope that genius will always be heard, and by a few, loved. ;