PERFECTION

New Zealand Listener, Volume 39, Issue 988, 25 July 1958, Page 24

PERFECTION

WITH what temerity do I place this , title at the head of this paragraph? Yet, for me it is all I can do. It refers to a short play, quite unheralded, which I heard only because I was too somnolent at 7.30 when Parliament began to switch to more congenial pastures. Miss Duveen was adapted by Ivan Brandt from a short story by Walter de la. Mare. The BBC produced it, and surely they have never done anything finer. The story is one of the most beautiful by that poet of exquisite sensibility, Walter de la Mare. It has the delicacy of outline, the perfection of finish, of a Chinese painting, its few characters somehow caught in

attitudes of the most poignant and ir ward suffering. Miss Duveen is a strange woman of breathless intuitions and fancies, guided by an earthy and because of this, sinister cousin, Miss Coppin. The only person to whom Miss Duveen can reveal her fluttering sorrows and joys, is Arthur, the boy who tells the story in recollection, and also acts it in fact. This the producer admirably managed by having an adult voice for the narrator (Robert Eddison) and a child’s voice for the actuality as it was recalled, Miss Duveen finally, after a series of delicate confidences to Arthur, is,'as they said a few years ago, "put away." And does the boy sorrow? Not at all, He is relieved that her strange, embarrassing presence, with its potentialities for blushes and awkwardness, is at last removed from his life. Only much later

when he recalls her sad, delicate mystery, is he aware of the tragedy of Miss Duveen. And here it seemed to me, caught like the trembling of a drop of dew on the edge of a leaf, was a microcosm of all experience. Marie Ney played’ Miss Duveen with exactly the right note of shyness mixed with a palpitating alarm, and the producer controlled the movement of the short play with the surest mastery. Really, the most triumphant translation to broadcasting I have

ever heard.

B.E.G.

M.