Extravaganza

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 929, 31 May 1957, Page 20

Extravaganza

HE production by the Auckland studios of Eric Linklater’s Love in Albania proved to be the most sophisticated offering we have had from the NZBS this year, though to judge from the presence of some of the players, the play was produced some 18 months ago. What this extravagant farce needs is relish and polish: Earle Rowell, the producer, and his skilful cast, gave it both. The plot exhibits the stock ingredients of farce, with characters rushing in and out of confined spaces on more or less amorous errands, but when one of them is an ulcerated poet who fought with the Partisans in Albania, when another is a dyspeptic civil servant, another a Scottish maid with a large and palpable scar on her thigh from her war service with an ack-ack battery, and when ‘finally, a U.S. top sergeant arrives thirsting for the blood of the poet who, he is convinced, has killed his daughter in Albania, though he has not seen her since the age of

two, we are in an unusual area of Terra farcicana. Some of the play is very funny. I liked best the scene where the whole cast is in an air raid shelter; bombers scream overhead and drop their loads. The poet and the civil servant become friends through their ulcers, the top sergeant strokes the maid’s wound, at once awed and rapturous about the immense possibilities of democracy, and the civil servant's wife plays her cello (execrably), to keep spiritual values alive in the midst of adversity. This is superb farce, and a superb comment on the English at war. But, despite the wit ofthe dialogue and the intelligence of the cast, the characters and situations were often too bizarre to be enveloping, and some were just silly-the alligator in the bath, for example. Still, I'd put up with a lot

for that air-raid.

B.E.

G.M.