Play less than a total success

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32846, 21 February 1972, Page 14

Play less than a total success

"The Promise,’’ by Aleksei Arbuzov. Produced by Alex Henderson. Elmwood Players. Elmwood Playhouse, Fulton Avenue. February 19 to 26. Running time: 8.00 to 10.25.

“The Promise" is a difficult play, the kind one can Imagine being specially written as a vehicle for certain distinguished actors; however. without such a powerful delivery one becomes conscious that its story is something of a cliche, its characters are stereotypes given to exaggerated postures, and the dramatic technique involves rather much telling at the expense of showing. AH of this means that Alex Henderson’s enterprising attempt at the play with a relatively inexperienced cast was doomed from the first to be something less, than a total success—and; with this kind of play noj compromise is acceptable. j Although all three young actors showed a definite amount of competence, they clearly lacked the resourcefulness that would be necessary to build their characters out to a dimension adequate to take the play’s full focus. Vocal intractability was most noticeable in Denis White who was visually well

suited to the role of Marat, the Soviet war hero, but whose dialogue sometimes verged on monotony and was decidedly weak in the portrayal of emotions. David Walshaw managed to draw some well-earned laughs from his better lines in the second act, but his conception of the poetaster as a “little man” meant that a lot of the significance was drained out of the finale; his voice also was too limited in its range of pitch. Drina Hearfield alone seemed capable of bringing her role up to a presentable level, but on the first night she made a surprising number of lapses into the emotional lethargy from which the other characters suffered. One imagines that, given better support, she could return the kind of per- : formance that this play needs, one charged with i latent emotion and the i anguish of a puritanical guilti consciousness. The lighting was generally good, and the costumes were adequate in the last act but surprisingly bad in the first; the recorded effects were also unsatisfactory — would an air raid over Leningrad really sound like an oldfashioned cistern flushing? There is not much substance to the play’s story, and. for it to justify itself, lit must have a more convincing portrayal of the i subtle perplexities of the , puritan attitude towards . personal relationships—something New Zealanders should be abie to understand fairly easily. If a play is deficient; in sheer action, something else must be submitted to; hold audience interest; what this play must have is more depth in character conception. —H. D. McN.