Two Plays This Week

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31678, 14 May 1968, Page 9

Two Plays This Week

Two actors wellknown on, but absent from, the Christchurch stage for several years will reappear this week in “Hay Fever,” the Noel Coward situation comedy of the 1920 s which has been selected as the Canterbury Repertory Society’s second production for 1968.

One is Bernard Kearns, producer for the N.Z.B.C. in Christchurch, who was last seen on stage as Polonius in Dame Ngaio Marsh’s production of “Hamlet” in 1958; the other is Elizabeth Conway, whose last stage appearance was five years ago. The play, says the producer, Mervyn Thompson, contains hardly any witty lines, but is very funny. The plot, such as it is, concerns the Bliss family —a gay, eecentiric lot with artistic pretensions. Each of the four members, unknown to the others, invites a friend for the week-end to the family's country house. The four couples are comically mismatched, so they take a roundabout route to more satisfactory pairings. In the meantime the conventional visitors are driven to distraction by the Blisses’ habit of treating everything as a game —even love.

“The play has a place in social hiatory,” Mr Thompson says. “It mirrors, without undue exaggeration, a certain section of life in the twenties: dizzy, hedonistic, frivolous. Some people tell me the play is dated, but this is true only if laughter has gone out of date.”

Recently "Hay Fever” was added to the repertoire of the National Theatre in Britain, and Kenneth Tynan wrote of

it that: “If it is possible to romp fastidiously, that is what Coward does. I have heard him accussed of enervating English comedy by making it languid and blase. The truth, of course, is the opposite: Coward took sophistication out of the refrigerator and set it bubbling on the hob,” The cast, besides Bernard Kearns and Elizabeth Conway, includes Mavis Reesby as Judith Bliss, Richard Harvest and Edna Neville, Anne Bradshaw as the flapper, and three teen-age newcomers, Paul Sonne, David Dowling and Christine Perry. The play will open on Saturday for a season lasting until May 25. Also on stage from May 18 to May 25 will be the Elmwood Players, in Edward Albee’s adaptation of Carson McCuller’s “The Ballad of the Sad Cafe.” This play is an entry in the Benson and Hedges festival of full-length plays, and the judge—the wellknown New Zealand playwright, Bruce Mason—will be in Christchurch for three days to assess it. Hunter Bell is the producer, and the cast includes Bill Hayward, David Williams, David Good, Chris Howell, John Bateman, Jenny Papprill, Basil O’Sullivan, Beryl MacLeod, Ruth Winstanley, Pat Burke and Ivan Finlayson.

“Edward Albee,” says the New York Times, “has converted Carson McCuller’s strange, tender prose poem into a play flecked with weird, halting poetry. Their art has joined to reveal the terrible and dim face of a shattered and unnatural love.”

The photographs show:— Left (above): Bernard Keams and Mavis Reesby in a scene from “Hay Fever.” Right (above): Jenny Papprill and John Bateman In “The Ballad of The Sad Cafe.”