Robust Shoemakers

New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1053, 30 October 1959, Page 16

Robust Shoemakers

| HAVE read Dekker’s The Shcemaker’s Holiday more than once for "professional"? purposes and a few years ago saw a University production of the play. I must confess that I have always thought it something of a bore, with that kind of fill-up-the-ale-cans-ho-Jolly-Jenkin Elizabethan humour’ which couldn’t have been very funny even then, and a crude mixture of boisterous noisiness and improbable romance which Shakespeare barely gets away with. But the BBC radio version struck the scales from my philistine eyes. Spirited playing can do much for an indifferent play, but it can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. This World Theatre productidn, if not a silk purse, was a pretty good nylon one, vigorous, robust, goodhearted and affectionately human, Perhaps Raymond Raikes’s adaptation had removed some of the longueurs of the (continued on next page)

Elizabethan text but I am inclined to give major credit for the success of the radio play to Sir Donald Wolfit’s fullthroated, full-blooded, full-bodied Simon Eyre, the shoemaker-mayor, as open as the day, as straight as a die and as mellow as pre-chemical British beer. Another fine addition to his formidable list of memorable radio impersonations this broad piece of playing by Sir Donald brought Dekker’s tradesman’s comedy dazzlingly to life in a way I feel the ordinary joker would be quick

to respond to.

J.C.

R.