CHAMPION

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 927, 17 May 1957, Page 24

CHAMPION

N its day, Love on the Dole was a fine, brave play, and its day was 1935. I confess to entertaining some irritation at the prospect of a new NZBS production of a play, so firmly rooted in the past as to be irretrievable, and I began composing tart little sentences for this page, about a spirit of adventure only twenty yeats behind the times. But the play is still contemporary. It is so well constructed, its dialogue so neat and shapely, and its sense of human dignity so simple and profound, that its fine bravery survives undimmed. And it demonstrates so lucidly the truth of Shaw’s celebrated

dictum on poverty being the worst of crimes, in which nearly all the others have their roots, that it produced on me, listening, a fierce indignation. This is as much a tribute to Bernard Beeby’s production, in exemplary taste, except for the portentous opening music, redolent of opera at its most lurid, and the old hands at Productions proved quite at home in their Lancashire accents. The chorus of old harpies, battening like flies on the poverty and sorrow around them, were champion, and Dorothy Campbell gave a performance as Sally of memorable distinction. I could have wished there were a play of equal warmth and skill written of our own sufferings in the early thirties, but I wonder if our actors would be as convincing in Kiwi as in Lancashire?