EDEN PHILLPOTTS

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 100, 22 January 1936, Page 20

EDEN PHILLPOTTS

Nature Portrayed in the

Drama

PLAYS OF SIMPLE LIFE

(By

H.P.)

Eden Phillpotts, the dramatic author and playwright, who wrote “Buy a Broom,” the interesting play of gipsy life played last week by the Wellington East College Ex-Pupils’ Association, was 73 years of age on November 4. I feel constrained to write something of this man and his plays because of a very sincere admiration for the class of play he produces. Eden Phillpotts is quite a simple, straightforward, honest type of writer, who has “one foot stuck in the soil of England.” He loves to write not of kings and queens, of degenerate lords and their mistresses, of the decadent maunderings of artists, alleged and otherwise, or of the marital infelicities of Hollywood. His forte is the lives and loves of the people of the earth — the real people who grapple with, the soil and wrench from it the wherewithal for you and me to live. And he knows these people, their psychology, their hates and their desires. That is remarkable, for Eden I’hillpott’s tra.iniug had nothing to do with Mie land. - He is the son of Captain Henry Phillpotts and was born at Mount Aboo, India, when his father’s regiment was stationed there. After leaving school he was for ten years a clerk in an insurance company, but that did not content him. He then studied for the stage for a time under the impression that the histrionic profession might be his natural metier. He was nob long in discovering that such was not the case. Still, it was one way of an intellect struggling for the proper means of expression. It led to him writing for the stage aud for lovers of fiction. His first play. “A Breezy Morning,” was written 40 years ago. Then came "The Golden Wedding,” "The Secret Woman,” “The Point of View,” “The Carrier Pigeon.” "The Shadow,” "The Mother.” “The Angel In the House” (with B. M. Hastings), and then in 1916 “The Farmer’s Wife,” which at its first run was given 1329 performances in London. Since that success Mr. Phillpotts has written other plays, none more successful than “Yellow Sands,” which ran for a year at the Haymarket Theatre (with Cedric Hardwicke as the genial old toper, but always the gentleman). It was my pleasure to see “Yellow Sands” in Loudon in 1927, and I considered it one of the best plays then on the London boards. There I was told that although it had been running for some months, the author had not seen it.

Mr. Phillpotts lives at Broad Clyst, near Exeter, Devonshire.