Chekhov and Branch Water

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 938, 2 August 1957, Page 30

Chekhov and Branch Water

WE have now had on radio both of N. C. Hunter’s imitations of Chekhov. I think I prefer A Day by the Sea, broadcast last’ Monday, to the later Waters of the Moon, chiefly because it seems to strain less after melancholy and literary nostalgia, and to achieve genuinely poetic overtones, where the other play is trite. The grouping together of frustrated and self-deluced people with empty lives hardly makes for cheerful entertainment; yet the serious and. sensitive playing of the NZBS cast left behind not depression but a sense of character explored and humanity vindicated. In roles "created," as I believe the jargon goes, by Sybil Thorndike and John Gielgud, Davina Whitehouse and William Austin played with exactly the right nuances, But I felt that Michael Cotterill, as William Gregson, made the deepest impression, especially in his scene of maudlin selfpity. A play of this kind-contrivance masked by delicate character-balance-seems just right for radio; Roy Leywood’s adaptation kept all the flavour of the original. But how very much better the Russians do this sort of thing -and how faintly but unmistakably dated the characters appear beside the tail-chasing types of Messrs Osborne, Amis and Wain.