Off the Rails

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 926, 10 May 1957, Page 20

Off the Rails

PROM 1Y¥Z recently, I caught Frank Baker’s Last Train Home, which I had missed on its Auckland broadcast, and which I wanted to hear because of its use of members of a visiting theatrical company. Although, in smallish parts, local actors more than held their own, it was pleasing to meet some new voices as a change from the NZBS Stock Company. I was especially struck by the playing of Jessica Noad as a nun, and of Diana Perryman as a distraught wife. Yet I felt that John Meillon, as a wanted murderer, overacted, particularly in the final scenes. Surprisingly for an experienced radio actor, he seemed to slip into stage melodrama technique. The play itself was yet another variation on the time-worn situation of various types holed up somewhere and confronted by a gunman -in this case, in a waiting-room expecting a storm-delayed train. But it spun along interestingly enough, under Earle Rowell’s incisive direction, until a banal climax and a fatuous epilogue threw it off the rails. My final impression was that, even as light-weight melodrama, the play was hardly worthy of the cast and producer.