Open Microphone

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 942, 30 August 1957, Page 20

Open Microphone

NEWS OF BROADCASTERS ON AND OF F THE RECORD

THE CHAMPAGNE WAS REAL

ICELY COURTNEIDGE _ went through the motions of eating a Stage-prop cake and _ drinking the coloured water in the latest of her many London successes, The Bride and the Bachelor, when she became aware of

something unreal about them (writes J. W. Goodwin from London). The

unreality was that they were real champagne and cake-birthday cake. Robertson Hare and Naunton Wayne, playing opposite her, had decided that her 64th birthday should not pass unnoticed. It was just one of the many celebrations in a year which marks the 50th anniversary of Miss Courtneidge’s first stage

part. The BBC has devoted several programmes to recalling the gaiety of her musical comedies and the ebullience of her clowning. There are probably few tadio listeners in New Zealand who have not laughed often at such old favourites as "Laughing Gas" and the double-dazen dimask dunner nipkins. Her first part was at the age of 14 in 1907 as Rosie Lucas in Tom Jones, the comic opera which her father helped to adapt from Fielding’s novel. After

that, although her idol was Gertie Millar and she had no. ambition to wear trousers on the stage, she spent many years as a male impersonator in the Burlington Bertie tradition. The highlights of her career, she considers, have been Under Your Hat, Under the Counter, and Gay’s the Word. Call on her in her dressing room and you'll find these highlights recalled appropriately by a lamp with the shade made of miniature posters of these shows. "Retire? I’m going on whether they like it or not," she says with the zest which

has endeared her to audiences. On all occasions celebrating her jubilee, at luncheons, on the stage and in the studio, Cicely Courtneidge’s most endearing characteristic has been the way she has brought her husband, Jack Hulbert, into the tributes. Of their 41 years of married life, she says: "He’s the one who has given me most encouragement. He’s been marvellous to me, always putting me before himself." Never one to take her own success seriously, she probably went to the heart of the matter when she said: "I’ve never looked back except at the things I adore-people. I love people."

HANS KNAPPERTSBUSCH, the German conductor, has always had more than his share of criticism and abuse. "That’s not Brahms!" scream the critics. "What has happened to his tempo?" . -. "A competent artist

KNA

but not an inspired one." . . « "He is, never the profound or eloquent interpreter." . . . And so on. Yet "Kna" (as he is affectionately called) has the power to captivate his audience. His performances, . especially

of Wagner, Mozart and Richard Strauss operas, draw tremendous crowds, and after his success in

Munich in the 1920’s he was ranked among the foremost conductors in Germany. His conducting, with its variable tempi and disregard for the stop-watch, owes its brilliance to his complete mastery of the text and his attention to technical detail. Always full of selfconfidence, Kna scorns rehearsals, and when working with a first-class ensemble tends (so they say) to rely on his lucky star. Kna was born in Elberfeld, Germany, on March 12, 1888. He studied philosophy at the University of Bonn, then took a conductor’s course at the Cologne Conservatoire under Fritz Steinbach. Steinbach, incidentally, dismissed him as his most wntalented pupil. Kna first attracted attention as a conductor in Holland, where, in 1912, he conducted a festival of Wagnerian music dramas. He went from there to Elberfeld, Dessau and, in 1922, Munich. There he succeeded Bruno Walter, and

signed a lifelong contract as musical director of the Bavarian State Theatres. When the Nazis came into power, Kna refused to join the party or to subscribe to its artistic policies. He quickly fell into disfavour, and~when in 1934 he conducted the world premiere of an American opera by Vittorio Giannini he was severely reprimanded for featuring foreign talent at the expense of German. The ‘tremendous applause he received at the end of each concert, however, made Nazi officials cautious about removing him. But in February, 1936-on the decision of Hitler himself-Kna was forced into artistic exile. He moved to Vienna and conducted at the Vienna State Opera and at the Philharmonic concerts, moving on again when Germany annexed Austria. Unlike many of his colleagues, Kna hates publicity and applause. He does his best to keep his name out of gossip columns and critics seldom succeed in

interviewing him in the orthodox manner. Today he lives in Munich-the city that made him great-and devotes his time almost bog Ms his music. VEN among those who take their filmgoing dead seriously, there are some with reservations about Tennessee Williams- who will declare, for example, that his work is only a con-

coction of sex and sadism — but because he is such: a controversial playwright both admirers and. detractors will want ‘to hear the author of Baby Doll, A Streetcar Named Desire and The Rose Tattoo when he reads some of. his own work from , YC. stations on September 4. If you were to talk with Tennessee Williams you'd find a different man from the writer of the legend. Answering the question, "Why don’t you write about nice péople?" he says: "I’ve never

THE OTHER MAN

met one that I couldn’t love 1f 1 completely knew him and understood ‘him, and in’ my work I have at least tried to arrive at knowledge and understand-

ing. I don’t believe in ‘original sin.’ I don’t believe in

‘guilt.’ I don’t believe in‘ villains or heroes-only in right or wrong ways that individuals have taken, not by choice but by necessity or by certain still-uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances and their antecedents...... That’s why I don’t understand why our propaganda machines are always trying to teach us, to persuade us, to hate and fear. other people."

‘To critics who find a disturbing note of harshness and coldness and violence and anger in his more recent works, Tennessee Williams explains that without planning to do so he has followed the developing tension and anger and violence of the world and time he lives in through his own steadily increasing tension as a writer and a person. "I have never,’ he says, "written about any kind of vice which I can’t observe

in myself." And when you ask him if he has a positive message he will declare it is this: "The crying need of a_ great world-wide human effort to know ourselves and _ each , other a great deal better, well enough to concede that no man has a monopoly on right or virtue any more than any man has a corner on duplicity end = jeouil.":. at people, races ,and nations would start with that = selfmanifest truth, then "JT think ‘that the world could sidestep the sort of corruption which I

have involuntarily chosen as the basic, allegorical theme of my plays." The grandson of a clergyman and the son of a travelling salesman, Tennessee Williams was at college during the depression, but left to work as a clerk during the day and to write at night. Later he had a number of different jobs while going through university. At one time or another. he has been a_ hotel lift attendant, a waiter and a theatre usher. As far back at 1940 his first play, Battle of Angels, was produced in Boston, and won him a Rockefeller Fellowship. Tennessee Williams lives in New Orleans, in. the Deep South which has provided the scenes and the people for so much of his work.