IBSEN PLAY STAGED

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22371, 7 April 1938, Page 7

IBSEN PLAY STAGED

UNIVERSITY DRAMATIC SOCIETY

Henrik Ibsen’s five-act play, “The Lady from the Sea,” was the subject for the Canterbury University College Dramatic Society’s first production of the year, played before a fair attendance in the Little Theatre last evening.

The play is a mixture of psychology and poetic fancy, surrounding one of Ibsen’s haunting principles—that an action is only valuable and reasonable if it is the spontaneous outcome of the individual will. The theme is the psychological development of a woman who has nothing particular to occupy her life. She frets at the restriction of wifely duty on which her husband insists until, when he removes them, and the idea of compulsion is gone, she finds no further, attraction in forbidden fruit, and a strong attraction in her obvious duty. Mr E. L. Cordery as Dr. Wangel, and Miss E. B. Frye, his second wife, gave convincing performances in the main parts, while Misses Eileen Cuff and Isobel Brown as Dr. Wangel’s daughters by his first wife, and Messrs A. Gate, R. Henry, and R. Walker in minor paxts, gave satisfactory performances.