The Press FRIDAY, JUNE 2, 1967. “Twelfth Night”—And Ngaio Marsh

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31385, 2 June 1967, Page 8

The Press FRIDAY, JUNE 2, 1967. “Twelfth Night”—And Ngaio Marsh

“As for me ”, writes Ngaio Marsh in her autobiography published last year, “the time has “come when, in the theatre as elsewhere it is “ appropriate to look back, to ask oneself what one “ has chiefly desired to bring about, how far one has “succeeded”. Looking back, Dame Ngaio Marsh remembers a Canterbury College in the middle years of the war and a Drama Society with no membership, no money, and no actors. But such students as did not disappear overnight into the armed forces remained eager to put on a play; and they found themselves a producer in Ngaio Marsh. Though they were arrogant, opinionated, sometimes mannerless, and not always dependable, they began, as they were guided into an understanding of “Hamlet”, to subject themselves willingly to an intensive cramming in basic techniques, to perpetual correction and an iron discipline. The play was performed in the little Shelley Theatre which was imbedded upstairs somewhere in that part of the university buildings entered by the eastern lobby off Worcester street “ Hamlet ” was followed in the ensuing years by “ Othello ”, “ A Midsummer Night’s Dream ”, “ Henry “V”, and “Macbeth”. Two of these plays were toured by the society throughout New Zealand. Then at the beginning of 1953 the Shelley Theatre was completely gutted by fire, and in the rebuilding process disappeared into studies and laboratories. Since then the University Drama Society has had no home. Under Ngaio Marsh they have rehearsed in a condemned boat-shed, a dog show, an attic, a parish schoolroom, and a disused brewery. In these unpropitious nurseries there has been bred a splendid series of Shakespearean plays for presentation in the Civic Theatre. (“This great barn is rather like a “ theatrical joke in bad taste ”.) Today, on the new university site at Ham, the students have provided themselves with a handsome little theatre whose sweeping stage and huge flytower must make a striking contrast with conditions in the destroyed theatre, with its cramped stage behind which actors and stage-hands moved by squeezing along the back wall. The students who performed there and those who crowded into that narrow and quivering auditorium have now been scattered. The abiding link between past and present is that of the exacting, gracious, and witty personality who brought the authority of her wide experience and the enthusiasm of her creative talent into the student drama.

It is altogether fitting that the new theatre should be called the Ngaio Marsh Theatre; that the inaugural performance by the University Drama Society should be a play by Shakespeare, “Twelfth “ Night ”; and that the play should again be directed by the woman whose reading audience is world-wide and who has already been honoured by the University of Canterbury by the conferment of a Litt.D. degree. The occasion is given a distinction at once more striking and more elegiac by the reflection that Dame Ngaio Marsh has also declared: “ I have directed my “ last Shakespeare play in the Civic and perhaps my “ last for the society