FRAIL WOMEN AND TOUGH MACHINES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 951, 1 November 1957, Page 16

FRAIL WOMEN AND TOUGH MACHINES

SOME time ago various Aucklanders had a piece of me for saying that perhaps we could not, locally, produce an opera with the verve and competence shown in Bruce Mason’s offering from Wellington. I hope those patriots will now read on. Auckland this week has staged, with local talent, a magnificent production of La Traviata. Forecasts were gloomy, so were omens. "He’s flying too high," said pessimists of director-conductor Frank Poore. "It'll be like everything else in Auckland-the bridge that’s going to be too small before anyone has a chance of crossing it-that first spirited move to save Judges Bay-the Festival-" etc. and etc. As to the omens: when Mina Foley withdrew because she felt she had not time to learn her part, and the whole burden of Violetta fell upon an untried 21-year-old, Mary O’Brien, the foresighted critics threw up their hands and condemned the venture to chaos. Chaos’ it was not. I went on Thursday evening, and, with hand on heart, can honestly swear that I enjoyed it fully as much as the one and only other Traviata I have ever seen. This was in London, at Sadler’s Wells when, in preparation for a long sojourn in the musical desert (Auckland), we took in as much opera as we could afford after paying for our passages. I’m told by a member of the Auckland orchestra that Thursday was one of their happiest occasions: there was a "feeling" in the air, that night; everybody played and sang as they had not done before. But I can’t imagine that the delicious, fresh confidence of Mary O’Brien failed her at any time, or ever will. She sang like a bird; and died like a wounded bird, too. That, perhaps, was proof of her essential feeling for the part: the final scene in Traviata is a horrid test of sincerity and tact. At this deathbed, and in this production, only lovely woman remained lovely: we must give the last word to Goldsmith, not to that grating cynic T. S. Eliot. Apart from Violetta herself, there were so many other good things in the

production that I am in the happy position of being unable to list them all. Enough that even the very critical musical person who was with me turned sideways in the first act, and said with warm appreciation, "This is good!" So it was. Auckland Can Make It. Bd 3% we SOMETIMES America can’t (and [’m not going now to write about the Sputnik). As the weekend was doubtful, blowing and _ raining viciously, Philip and Johnny and I went to the flicks. ;We went, by common consent, to a film especially for Those Important People, the children. Sitting Bull was its entrancing title, and it was reputed to be all about Cowboys ’n’ Injuns. Well, it may have been, at any tate my Important People seemed quite satisfied that it was: but, as the sound track was practically unintelligible owing ta some technical hitch which no one bothered to do anything about, and .as the colour was fitful, the history ramshackle, and the piously inserted love-story a pain in the neck, Mum did not enjoy herself. Also, the manners of the young in the cinemas nowadays are not what she was accus- tomed to. When we went to see Charlie Chaplin in black and white, clutching our admission fees of threepence in our hot little hands, we certainly went unaccompanied, as many children nowadays do; but we equally certainly behaved ourselves. The parental hand, though busy at home in various other ways, lay ‘heavy upon us; and, even had my sister and I been born of the tougher sex, we would no more have thought of stuffing popcorn down our neighbour’s necks, or of spitting peanuts directly into their eyes, than we would have thought of flying to the moon. (Oh, dear, Sputnik again, it does keep cropping up, doesn’t it?) I don’t blame a parent sitting next to me, one of the few adults in the audience, who kept ~ up a running commentary of his own while the film teetered on. "Aw, shut up! Let’s try and hear what they’re saying, you kids!" and so forth. If I nad wanted to hear what they were

Saying, 1 would have joined him in his Jeremiad for the dear sober days of our youth; but, as I never collected any interest to. start with, there was nothing to lose except time, in the next hour or so. Only one complete sentence has remained with me. Sitting Bull, a probably phoney Indian whose face. tanged in hue from brick red to a livid donkey-grey, according to the whim of the photographic process involved, said with a gusty sigh, "When the white man wins a battle, he calls it a victory: when the Indian does, it’s called a massacre." Flatulently obvious, but none the less true. The whole badness of this film, added to the remark of an official of the Parent Teachers’ Federation recently, has set me wondering whether we don’t get exactly what we deserve. We parents who demand something better for our children’s rare

visits to the cinema-we who do not pack off the kids with relief every Saturday morning, wet or fine, without bothering about the film they are going to, should have rallied to the support of the special films for the young which are coming now, sparsely and rather uncertainly, into this country. According to my Parent Teacher acquaintance, the whole project of bringing in these films

is being sabotaged-not by commercial interests, or American influences, or anything sinister like that, but by indifferent parents who won’t keep an eye on the Press and make a point of taking the children along when there’s something good advertised. I have been a sinner myself, in this respect, but am now (partly as a result of the yawning horrors of Sitting Bull) about to turn over a new leaf. It would be nice to imagine a rustle of turned-over leaves throughout New Zealand. No use moaning about the deplorable effects of bad films on the children, if we won't take the trouble to ensure that they see the good ones: it may be years before we get such a chance again. Eg a te HE local press had recently a touching tit-bit. Some wives, it was said, were apprehensive about labour-saving machines in the home: are these getting the admiration and respect earlier due to the Little Woman? Can the wife who ‘mixes a cake by electricity claim that husbandly esteem and admiration in which she used to bask when she did the job toilsomely by hand? To any such, I would say: Wait till the fiendish mind of man has evolved a substitute wife-a machine which not only says "Yes, dear," and "Coo, you are a one!" at the right moments, but also gazes starry-eyed at the magnificent male while doing so. Then we might start to worry-but not till then.

Sarah

Campion