REDEEM THE TIME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 930, 7 June 1957, Page 20

REDEEM THE TIME

| HAVE heard people say that they do not care for T. S. Eliot’s readings of hig own verse; it is the voice of his own Gerontion, they say, "an old man in a dty month." It may be so. The voice is often harsh, sometimes unsteady, and many of his vowels are far from euphonious. It is the reverse of the "beautiful poetry voice." But for me, that is its virtue; in that, lies its incomparable power to evoke the essence of his poems. I have read Ash Wednesday many times, but some. passages have only become clear by hearing Eliot himself read it. The weariness of the opening, "Because I do not hope to turn again," the flatness of the passage beginning "Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree," threw all the strange imagery into high relief: there seemed no barrier to difect cofitact with the word. As Eliot reads them, his voice at once harsh and unemphatic, these poems and choruses have an incantatory power unrivalled in our age. Priestley’s Everyman B. PRIESTLEY’S Johnson Over Jordan was first produced just before the war. It is his most eloquent and imaginative work for the theatre. Drawing sOmewhat for its theme and incidents from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, it shows a man’s soul in purgatory enduring the purifying experiences which the life he has led must undergo before he can'pass to higher spiritual realms. Johnson is a decent sort of chap, Yorkshire born, not very bright, a bit of a fool. But he has warmth, and the solid, earthy common-sense which somehow stops our tottering age from collapsing altogether. The play is both deeply felt and finely written, and Johnson’s final speech, "I have been a foolish and an ignorant man," has some of the reticent but compelling poetry of Eliot’s choruses. Bernard Beeby’s production was splendid, with a fine vir-

tuosity in the use of echoing microphones; the music, too, was admirably chosen from sources undisclosed, often heightening the action, sometimes directly expressing it, in exactly the mode that Priestley asks for. I was following the text, and noted that where ‘Prisetley asks for "an exquisite tune" he got it. But crown of the whole production was guest actor John Meillon’s superb performance as: Johnson; rich in vitality, yet controlled throughout by a beautiful tact, it is a worthy companion to William Austin’s memorable Colum-

bus.

B.E.G.

M.