"TOAD OF TOAD HALL”

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 239, 6 July 1931, Page 4

"TOAD OF TOAD HALL”

Kenneth Graham’s charming phantasy, “Wind in the Willows" has been read and loved by many people, but few. know A, A. Milne’s stage version of it, and when on Saturday evening the pupils of Chilton Saint James School, Lower Hutt, gave their'third performance of it the audience discovered in the characters vivid and living personalities long to be remembered as friends.

Nearly all the characters are hedgerow, woodland or river-bank animals—the rat, so kindly, tactful and altogether loveable; young, rathdr timid, but most affectionate; the weasels, stealthy, slinking, fearful, with nevertheless a spice of humour; besides stoats, ferrets, rabbits,' squirrels, a duck, who might have stepped straight from the pages of Jemima Puddleduck, and a most handsome rooster. Badger is a dear thing, rather an old bore with his lectures and reminiscences, but a gentleman nevertheless. Then there is toad. Toad of Toad Hall, “the magnificent, the incomparable, the superb,” at least according to himself, for the other animals only smile discreetly at his boastful swaggering, and even more discreetly during his fleeting moments of humility. The play follows his fortunes from, the moment when he first develops a, craze for exceeding speed limits, through his arrest and subsequent imprisonment, to hi? escape, aided by the gaoler’s daughter and her aunt, and, with the help of his friends, his triumphant eviction of his enemies from Toad Hall. The performance was perfect. Most careful atteritton’had been given to detail, the dresses were exactly right, and tho scenery was really amazing. Although Chilton Saint James has introduced into former plays many weird animals it certainly surpassed itself with Alfred tho piebald pOny with his expressive face and distressing Hck of any sense of humour.