SUCCESSFUL EVENING
Readings From Dylan Thomas
Donald Farr and Denis Lili are two young men with enterprise and ability who tried, last evening at the Hideaway, to bring together an audience which might want to spend an evening listening to the poetry and prose of Dylan Thomas.
Although only 20 or 30 people in Christchurch were attracted by the opportunity of hearing Thomas's work, the evening was successful. It demonstrated the extra dimensions that imaginative actors with disciplined voices can bring to writing that is sometimes wordbound on paper; and it created an atmosphere of living literature—words charged with the “mystery and meaning” of life being shared by performer and listener. The programme had form (beginning and ending with “In my art or sullen craft”); it was presented with a nice blend of informality and sophistication; and it had variety. The familiar “Memories of Christmas” suffered a little because Dylan Thomas’s own reading of his childhood reactions and impressions can hardly be imitated or enlarged upon. But the longer narrative, “The Mouse and the Woman,” was dramatised by the two actors with impressive sensibility. The ■ mouse and the woman are part of the real—and unreal—world of a madman who fumbles his way to an understanding of the kind of love needed for creation. Dramatised readings are, as overseas entertainers have shown us, often just as entertaining as a fully-mounted spectacle; it is to be hoped that Donald Farr and Denis Lili, and others who have the gift of storytelling, will be encouraged to continue practising their art by greater support for any further ventures. Organisers of festivals might, for example, consider public readings as an art? —P.R.S.
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Bibliographic details
Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30625, 16 December 1964, Page 22
Word Count
277SUCCESSFUL EVENING Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30625, 16 December 1964, Page 22
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