From Hong Kong Far
(CONSIDERING the number of wartime stories of heroic endurance still being published, we have had comparatively few dramatised war sagas from National stations. So Hong Kong Escape came as a pleasant change from the routine Monday night play. This version of the adventurous escape of Lieutenant R. B. Goodwin in 1944 from captivity in Hong Kong, through the perils of the enemies, traitors and illness, was first-rate radio material, the work of Colin Shaw, whose Salamis and Victory remains in my mind as pure diamond. The many accents, including the tricky Oriental ones, were neatly handled, dis-belief-suspending, anyhow. As Lieutenant Goodwin himself, William Austin’s urbane manner, especially in the narration, seemed to me hardly the most suitable for the character. And I felt that he rather over-worked his little trick of a minute hesitation before some phrases. "It was so-long before he came." Perhaps over-familiarity with the same mannerism in Won’t You Come In? has ‘blunted my appreciation of his Goodwin. Whatever the -caure, the urgency and tension of the script ----
did not seem matched by the playing. It all sounded a shade too cosy, even complacent; Lieutenant Goodwin's odyssey was surely a more strenuous
business altogether.
J.C.
R.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19570726.2.32.2
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 937, 26 July 1957, Page 18
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203From Hong Kong Far New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 937, 26 July 1957, Page 18
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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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