SYBIL THORNDIKE

Dominion, Volume 26, Issue 69, 14 December 1932, Page 13

SYBIL THORNDIKE

With that desire to please the public, and at the same time give them something that is above maudlin sentiment. J. C. Williamson. Limited, at considerable expense, has; brought to the Southern Tlemispher'e Dame Sybil Thorndike, one of the world's greatest actresses, at the head of a specially selected English company. 'When in Australia, Miss Thorndike selected from among the numerous plays which made her famous, a few with which, by her performance, she crowded the theatres in all the States she visited. She is now to come to New Zealand, and will open her season on Saturday, December 24, at the Grand Opera House with Bernard Shaw's provocative play. “Saint Joan.” She will also play Shaw’s “Captain Brassbound's Conversion,” Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” “Madam Plays Nap,” and “The Medea” of Euripides, in that order. "Saint Joan” demands much of its interpreters and of its audience, says an Australian critic. “It makes no concessions to second-rate acting or to secondrate minds. It is a play full of colour and life and interest and humour. There are no villains in the piece. They are merely men and women who act according to their* lights. In their limitations lies their tragedy and Joan’s.” As Joan, Dame Sybil Thorndike bears the burden of the play. She is Shaw's Joan, and history’s Joan, no doubt, to the life and death —Joan eager to be a soldier and to be regarded as a soldier only; Joan scornful of stupidity and prejudice: Joan ignorant of craft and cunning, bursting out in protest against the great; and Joan heroic, making straight for the pitfall from which the Church itself would save her.