"THE POHUTUKAWA TREE"
Sir,-R.M.R. in your issue of September 27 is rightly incredulous in the face of S,C.’s review of The Pohutukewa Tree, but I fear that §,C. did the lay no injustice. This was indeed Mr Mason’s conception of race relations, If one sets out to write a play about the problems of our society, it is important to get the problems right, It is surely naive, to say the least, to present an old Maori woman, deeply conscious of her tribal traditions and of her race, who behaves as a European does. Yet this is what Mr Mason invites us to believe. He fails to grasp, what any anthropologist could haye told him, that if one represents another culture one acts in terms of that, and not in terms of somebody else’s, One can conceive a Maori committing suicide but not, if she is a Maori of the old lady’s kind, for a European reason. One is tempted to wonder if Mr Mason knows any Maoris, or has lived among them, or whether his play is a feat of the imagination by Elia Kazan out of Tennessee Williams.
P.
C.
(Wellington).
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19571011.2.17.8
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 948, 11 October 1957, Page 11
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193"THE POHUTUKAWA TREE" New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 948, 11 October 1957, Page 11
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