Albanian Amours

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 930, 7 June 1957, Page 21

Albanian Amours

ADMIRE a great deal of Eric Linklater’s writing, and often feel that he has received less than his due as a satirist and as a humorous chronicler of quirky human nature. But I couldn’t quite see what he was up to in Love in Albania (ZB Sunday Showcase). It didn’t seem funny enough to be a comedy, sardonic enough to be a satire, or complex enough to be an interesting drama. The calculated anti-climax when the American father of a girl killed in Albania meets the man responsible for her death was rather a damp squib, and my @xpectation of something really uproarious, or profound, or perceptive, was disappointed. Still, as happens so often these days, the NZBS cast put up a rattling good show with rather fragile lines. Laurence Hepworth made his guerilla-author a nicely unpleasant person, and Elizabeth Pendergrast was pawkily convincing as a Scottish servant. Barry Linehan’s ex-convict American Military Policeman was a larger-than-life job, almost Falstaffian at times, and a thought stagey, but vigorously making the most of a somewhat improbable character. Yet I couldn't help feeling that ‘the whole thing could have been over much sooner. Stormy Petrel EIR HARDIE is such a legendary figure in British Socialist history that it came as a surprise to me to learn from The Man They Remembered, a BBC centennial commemoration (1YC) that there were so many still living who could speak of him as friend and teacher. Most of the speakers were in their seventies and eighties, one even ninety, and their old men’s memories threw a veil of idealisation over this stormy petrel of the Labour movement. One compared Hardie’s teaching to that of Christ; others stressed his devotion to the cause of the working-man, his absolute sincerity and his passionate humanitarianism. The very able commentator and questioner felt compelled to redress the balance a little by bringing out the less saintly qualities of this self-made, forceful pacifist and Labour pioneer-his vanity, his fanaticism and his doctrinaire Socialism. But there did emerge a living picture of a great and sincere man, by no means the crank and windbag his enemies dubbed him. The contributions of Emrys Hughes and Fenner Brockway were especially interesting. And what a joy to hear all those brave Scottish voices-as homely and sincere

as Hardie’s politics.

J.C.

R.