Eighteen Carat

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

Eighteen Carat

HE LATE CHRISTOPHER BEAN, which the NZBS presented last week in ZB Sunday Showcase, by Emlyn Williams, from the French, is a much earlier play than Priestley’s, and much richer and truer. Genius, in the person of Christopher Bean, exists off-stage,

since he died ten years before the play begins, and this makes him much easier to handle. His estate consists of a pile of pictures painted in another Burmanley, regarded by locals as hideous daubs, what people describe in letters to the press as "art." Suddenly he is discovered, proclaimed a genius, and assorted vultures from the art world descend on the household of Dr. Haggitt, in search of loot, The action pungently exposes the pretensions and charlatanry of the dealers’ world, and equally savagely, the horrible toadying of the Philistine, oncé he can set a price. There is a Welsh maid, Gwennie, to whom, it is slowly revealed, the late Christopher Bean was briefly married before his death, and she proves finally to be the rightful owner of the pictures, and she walks off with them at the end, refusing to allow the world’s value to be set on the only gifts her lover was able to make her. Genius, it is implied, will only live in those who love it for itself. The NZBS production was at least as vigorous as The Golden Entry, and it was entirely free from the many fluffs which marred the World Theatre production. | A bold experiment was the choice of Natasha Tver for Gwennie; several intonations unmistakably continental rather worked against the Welsh, but it was a very intelligent performarice, and the rise and fall of phrase, the lilt, was often astonishingly accurate.

B.E.

G.M.