Brilliant Production By Otago Group

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31449, 16 August 1967, Page 18

Brilliant Production By Otago Group

Whatever criticism may be levelled at the standards of performance in the drama section of the New Zealand Universities Arts Festival, there can be no complaint about lack of variety. There has been Greek tragedy by Euripides, symbolic drama by Ibsen, absurdity by Jarry and now a contemporary offering by David Halliwell, employing the fashionable recipe of outspoken sex-talk and arbitrary violence, both ritualised, seen in such writers as Edward Bond and Ann Jellicoe.

But Halliwell’s play, in spite of its flawed construction and wavering between realism and fantasy, far surpasses the works o' the dramatists mentioned above. His mastery of rhetoric is superb, he has an abundant gift for surrealist comic dialogue, and above all he has something to say and the ability to create real characters with which to say it His picture of “little” Malcolm Scrawdyke, a man of voracious yearnings, now sexual, now “political,” but reduced to impotence by his raging self-doubts, is terrifyingly honest; many a bearded, romantic bubble must have burst last night as James Wright gaunt haggard, fashionably unkempt gave a fullbodied and appropriately histrionic reality to this selfhating unit of a man, who cannot even believe in his own fantasies.

' Brilliant as this performance was, it was no better than those of the other players, all of whom created characters of solid substance. Brian MacKenzie’s slow, lumpish, slightly effeminate Ing-

ham, as reluctant and docile a revolutionary as has ever existed on or off a stage, was a splendid study; his deadpan delivery of the St Paul’s Cathedral sexual union speech was a cameo worthy of professional revue, and he extracted considerable pathos from the last scene.

If Ingham was firmly attached to the earth—physically more than imaginative —Wick, played with elan by Graeme Wood, was a bird of flight; his performance was notable for its ease of movement. Don Fulton’s realisation of the character of Nipple, constantly attempting to weave his voluptuous and delicate traceries in the Huddersfield smog and achieving only literary cliche, was brilliant. Elizabeth Strong gave good support in the part of Ann.

To criticise Rodney Kennedy’s production for the Otago University group would be merely to quibble. Only the visit to Le Treteau de Paris earlier this year prevents one from naming this the finest production, amateur or professional, to be seen in Christchurch this year. “Little Malcolm and his Struggle with the Eunuchs” played for one night only, and concluded the drama programme at the festival. —M.G.T.