Out to the Count
RAHAM SUTTON’S play Defeat, produced by the BBC, is an account of crime in another field, the more openly spectacular field of power politics, and the disasters which the gods prepare for those who are overweening. The play consists of flashbacks to a dialogue between Thucydides, returning to Athens after twenty years of exile, still gathering notes for his great history of the Peloponnesian War, and a survivor of the disastrous expedition which Athens made against Sicily in which the whole of the Athenian fleet was lost and thousands put to the sword. The chief character is Nicias, a man of great integrity but limited talents who, on the basis of continued military success in which, as he says himself, he could hardly have ‘failed, is made unwilling commander of the expedition. It was well done, full of striking parallels with our own time, the official lies to justify the naked lust for power all being trotted out, as they still are.
B.E.G.
M.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 927, 17 May 1957, Page 24
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168Out to the Count New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 927, 17 May 1957, Page 24
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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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