The Drooping Tree
FOUND The Linden Tree on the air | rather less satisfying than it appeared | when I read it a few years ago, Not that | the performances were poor. In fact, Roy | Leywood’s Professor Linden seemed to | me to be, as a sustained characterisa- | tion, one of the best things he has given | us, while Dorothy Campbell, who impressed in the fragile Castle in the Air, was very pleasing as the disputatious Jean Linden, and a new voice, David Littin, promising as Rex Linden. But the streamlined form of the play on | radio seemed to show up the woolliness | of Priestley’s thinking, or, at least, its | evasiveness, and the over-neat, over- | simplified arrangement of his characters | as mouth-pieces for various points of view. The dear old liberal professor, embodiment of J.B.P.’s own attitudes, the down-to-earth wife, blind to the finer things, the brash daughter, starry-eyed convert to an ingenuous Catholicism, the other daughter an argumentative Communist-these appeared mere puppets, squeaking as the prompter breathed, in a rigged debate, with no dramatic life of their own. It takes the wit, the gab and the energy of Shaw to get away with this sort of thing. j
J.C.
R.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19570418.2.41.5
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 923, 18 April 1957, Page 25
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198The Drooping Tree New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 923, 18 April 1957, Page 25
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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