"ALL STAR CAST."

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 181, 1 August 1936, Page 2 (Supplement)

"ALL STAR CAST."

A PLAY WITHIN A NOVEL.

A somewhat unusual and arresting scheme for a novel has been developed 4>y Miss Naomi Royde-Smith in "All Star Cast" (Macmillan). By introducing a mystery play as the focus of attention and allowing the imagination of a dramatic critic to play about the production, not merely from the literary point of view, but from the point of vLw of production technique and character interpretation, she has incorporated the play and the audience into an entity that dominates the book. The play, with its interaction of characters and motives, is interesting in itself, but it achieves a double significance from the intelligent understanding which the critic brings to it. As one reads, one sees the play through the eyes of an experienced critic who sees more -in a gesture or a tone than many people would see in a whole play, and whose appreciation of lighting and stage technique throws into sharp contrast the superficiality of many of the patrons sitting near him. The effect of actually watching the play is heightened by the inclusion of the whispered remarks from members of the audience, critical, uncomprehending, technical and often stupid, yet contributing something of personal interest to the figures on the stage. Moreover, the conversation in the lobbies between acts is designed to show the reactions of the various critics and the feeling of the audience as a whole, as the play progresses. The book is indeed "an attempt to record the complete experience of seeing, hearing and feeling a play in the theatre." The Curtain Call. Of particular interest to Auckland audiences is the author's summing up of the recurring curtain-call question: "It was as the curtain rose and fell three times before the welcome to this new young actress had spent itself, that David, for the first time in hie theatregoing life, understood the reason why this sound and fu,ry after a serious play had remained in practice throughout the history of the theatre. He had, on more than one occasion, joined with protesting theorists who had exclaimed against the barbarity of thus tearing away the illusion from a serious and moving drama by an insistence on the personality of the individual actors, apart from their existence in the characters tliey had just portrayed. . . . A play in the theatre was not over when the curtain fell on it for the last time. Just as it began with the gradual assertibling of the spectators, the quickly communicated expectation of the growing, entity of the audience that was to become one consciousness before long, the speculation aroused by a reading of the play-bill, the excitement that mounted with the lowering of the house lights, the thrill as of a launching, when the first stage picture was disclosed in its proscenium; so it. ended only when each of the men and women who had been more real than themselves when they took on the heightened reality of their art, returned in some degree to their original status and became once more merely, if triumphantly, players."