Parson's Egg

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 922, 12 April 1957, Page 24

Parson's Egg

OUIS MacNEICE’S plays for radio have become justly famous, The Dark Tower and Christopher Columbus may be considered masterpieces in their genre, exploring the resources of their medium with the virtuosity open to a poet of his distinction. But I cannot feel that these qualities were always present in Prisoner’s Progress, an allegory in the Bunyan style of prisoners of war in the struggle between the Greys and the Browns, but clearly enough, British and Germans. The modern Christian, Thomas Waters, is a bastard who knows his own father all too well, since he tried to seduce his son’s wife. This bizarre situation produces in Waters, as well it might, an intolerable anguish from which: he is finally released by Alison, a prisoner in the adjoining women’s compound, Waters is one of an escape group which tunnels out of the camp to find that by miscalculation they have bored into the women’s camp, into a stone age burial chamber which one of the women discovered beneath their dormitory. Dr Guggenheim, a fanatical . archaeologist, tries to prevent them from escaping by

the only route possible, demolishing the tomb. Finally, only Waters emerges, and is joined later by Alison.. The play was brilliantly acted, and several scenes were splendidly written. But, as a whole, it made no unified impression on me, and seemed let down by the absurd and wholly improbable situations.