THEATRE UNDER FIRE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 945, 20 September 1957, Page 15

THEATRE UNDER FIRE

THEATRE IN DANGER, by Bruce Mason and John Pocock; Paul’s Book Arcade, 8/6.

(Reviewed by

S. F.

Johnston

HE purpose of these six longish letters is stated by Dr Pocock: ". . . to discuss the present state of the New Zealand theatre and the canons of criticism that can legitimately be applied to it." The first three letters are concerned with the establishment of standards and the recording of disillusion. "The theatre is an essentially direct art. . . The qualities the actor must display ... are those of directness, plainness. and _ virility." Both writers find that the "pattern of speech" is the chief thing that actors must work at. Their discovery of a poverty in dramatic art both here and overseas is. set against their experiences in the only two New Zealand groups that, have met their requirements. The first letter from _ each correspondent ends in a rather gloomy discussion of the seemingly universal "decadence," of which "the prevailing cult of the artificial’ in the theatre is a manifestation. The New Zealand Players, in all but a few of their productions, are seen as blatant and unrepentant offenders.‘Dr Pocock is particularly severe (though never as rude as the dust-jacket blurb-one of the blurbiest I've read for a long timehopes he is). He concludes that "the last three years in New Zealand dramatic work have been singularly bad." This criticism is well-founded and forthright; and they blaze away, as big guns should, with gusto and good aim. The later part of the correspondence I found less entertaining and less persuasive. The long letters do not lend themselves to terse directness and the restrictions of the form become at times too apparent. There is too little real exchange of opinion, of argument and rebuttal, of point by point disagreement. The final impression of what they think is not as clear and as sharply memorable as those of their predecessors in this form of dramatic criticism. The chief themes of this later part of the book are "the relative positions of verse and prose plays," and "what it is

liké to be a playwright in New Zealand." There is nothing very new in what they say on the first of these, but their points are made in relation to® contemporary drama. Dr Pocock is vigorously opposed to T. S.. Eliot’s theory and practice, but to some extent the Eliot he dislikes is of his own making. He makes the good point that Eliot’s. concern that an audience should not be conscious of verse in the theatre as verse smacks of an urge for naturalistic illusion, but he hardly does justice to Eliot’s real point, his insistence on a dramatic verse which is not a decorative distraction. "The fantastic notion that poetry has to sound like ordinary speech’ would be equally fantastic to Eliot, who argues for a relationship between dramatic verse and the common man’s speech, not an identity of them. Using Charles Williams to teach Eliot that the Elizabethans recognised verse as verse and accepted it as a dramatic convention would have delighted them both. Mr Mason’s chief concern in_ his later letters is with the second of these themes and he has some important things to say about the difficulties in getting contemporary New Zealand life into touch with a world of universals and invisibles. His detailed discussion of his own plays is unselfconscious and very lively. Throughout both write on the New Zealand theatre with force and conviction. Their righteous indignation tends to colour their wider view and even distort it. The dissection of the prevailing decadence is a little too slick and sweeping and the insistence on speech as the chief element in drama leaves room for no full-throated affirmation of the primacy of action. The value of this correspondence lies in its discussion of New Zealand dramatic activity. Outside this the quality falls off and, in Mr Mason’s curious conception of the relationship of Ibsen to the Europe of his time, disappears.