Good Egg

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 922, 12 April 1957, Page 25

Good Egg

R JOHN POCOCK’S strikingly individual mode of speech and incisive judgments have been missed from our radio since his translation to Cambridge University, and I must therefore applaud whoever is responsible for commissioning him from time to time to speak to us from England. His most recent talk was on the London Theatre in 1956, and a masterly survey it was. How expertly he revealed the relationship of the theatre of the last 10 years to the fluctuating tempers of the times, submitting, for what he calls"the Fry period, the obsession of English playwrights for manner rather than matter, for the way in which themes were stated, rather than the themes themselves. All that is past, it seems. We are now in the period of Cards of Identity and Look Back in Anger, in both of which highly successful productions at the Royal Court Theatre, a genuine ferocity is apparent. Pocock welcomes this, though he makes several acute reservations about the importance of Lucky, Jim, Kingsley Amis’s hero, who has been adopted, Pocock feels on insufficient grounds, as the archetype of the fifties. He was at his most interesting on the visit to London of the late Berthold Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble.

He examined the alienation-technique of this playwright, with its Marxist groundbase, and sought to discover how the technique and the area explored in these plays could be related to our own theatre. Little, he finds; our themes are unlikely to deal with man in his social aspect purely, but with the problems of power, love, and crises of individual

action.

B.E.G.

M.