THE WHITE RABBIT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 924, 26 April 1957, Page 27

THE WHITE RABBIT

THE Elizabethan soldiers of fortune had many spiritual successors in World War Hl. One such was Wing Commander Yeo Thomas, or "le lapin blanc," as he was known to the patriots of France. As a director of a Paris fashion salon, his background before the war was hardly that of an adventurer, except for some wandering in Russia during the revolution. Then, not a young man, he enlisted in the ranks when wart came, little knowing the agonies he would endure before peace came. Bruce Marshall’s novel about Thomas, The White Rabbit, has been adapted for radio by Morris West, whose adaptations of Paul Brickhill’s The Dambusters, Reach for the Sky and The Great Escape were so successful. Production is by Ralph Peterson, who has recently returned to Australia after four years with BBC sound and television programmes. He also supervised the screenplay of his West End play and novel, The Square Ring. With one af the best-known radio actors, Bruce Stewart, as Yeo Thomas, The White Rabbit tells of Thomas’s work against the Germans, his capture and torture by the Gestapo, and his fight for survival in Buchenwald. In a typical incident he persuades the soldier-servant of

two German officers on a‘ train to smuggle a suitcase containing a radio_ transmitter through the barrier with his officers’ suitcases while a Gestapo search party is examining all passenger luggage. -Now being heard from 3YZ, The White Rabbit will start from 1YA and 2YZ in the week beginning May 13, and later from other National stations.