SUCCESSFUL COMEDY

Dominion, Volume 27, Issue 59, 2 December 1933, Page 22

SUCCESSFUL COMEDY

“The Wind and the Rain” NEW ZEALAND AUTHOR According to English newspapers received this week, one of tlie most successful plays produced in London last month was written by a New Zealander. This is a comedy entitled "The Wind and the Rain,” written by Dr. Merton Hodge and produced at St. Martin’s Theatre on October 18. Of this play the “Daily Telegraph” said: — " ‘The Wind and the Rain,’ by Merton Hodge, produced at the St. Martin’s last night, is a most refreshing play. It has humour, it has humanity, it has vitality. It paints a lively picture of a corner of the world which has not been staled for the stage. Finally it introduces us to a set of people who are extremely good company. “The scene is the lodgings of a group of students in a Scottish university town. The story tells how one of these students, Charles Tritton, missing the close companionship of his mother and of the girl she wants him to marry, goes to Anne Hargraves for consolation throughout the long five years of his training. “When Charles qualifies, Anne gives him Op. Not till she has done so, and his mother has died a rather arbitrary death for the author’s convenience, does Charles realise that Ann is the real love of his life, and bring the day to its appropriate happy ending. “Much of that cheerfulness is provided by one of Charles’s room-mates, a gay young spark, whose singleminded pursuit of every woman he sees causes him years of delay on the road to qualification as a doctor. This is a peach of a part for any comic actor, and Mackenzie Wardj realising his chance, brings off a peach of a performance.”

Of the same play “The Times” said: — \

“Le coeur a ses raisons . .; and it is the merit of Dr. Merton Hodge’s ostensibly simple little story that it successfully dramatises a conflict of these reasons in the heart of youth. Reason itself may suggest that the medical student has done no more than prefer a woman of his own finding to one chosen for him by his mother; but so well is the youth’s character realised, so persuasively are the crises of his formative years suggested, that we become aware of a spiritual struggle underlying his love affairs. He is called upon to decide, not merely between one woman and another, but between his past and his future. If he cannot abandon the one he must sacrifice the other.

“He is, as we first see him, a timid freshman settling down a little uneasily in a student lodging-house in Edinburgh. Though sensitive and talented, he is dependent. His nature is one which needs a source of strength that is not to be found within itself. This spiritual need a girl sculptor comprehends and can satisfy, but something deep in the student ties him to his mother, whom we never see, and. bids him please her by marrying the friend of his childhood. His struggle to make himself independent of a past that is already ceasing to feed his spirit makes the pattern of the play. It is an unobtrusive pattern and is once or twice in danger of being lost in the pleasantly youthful fqn of student life, which is given its full value by Mr. Mackenzie Ward’s lighthearted slacker, Mr. Ivan Brandt’s strenuous simplicity, and the sympathetic fatalism of Mr. George de Warfaz. The timely death of the mother seems to be a weakness in the pattern itself. If the student were forced during his mother’s lifetime to face the full implications of his dependence on her the dramatic point of the piece would, to our thinking, be sharper.”