REPERTORY PRODUCTION

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIX, Issue 194, 18 July 1939, Page 3

REPERTORY PRODUCTION

.On Saturday the Manawatu Repertory Society will open a. three-night season of the John Van Druten comedy, “The Distaff Side.” Produced by Miss Mavis Moitland and presented by several talented newcomers, as well as others whose work is well-known to the this play should have a reception as warm as that which greeted it in London, when it was act-claimed for its sympathetic and penetrating characterstudies of a modern normal family. The original Erie Millward was played by Dame Sybil Thorndike, and the sweet sincerity of the part should endear its present exponent (Mrs Dolby) to the audience. Despite the fact that there is “quite an upheaval on the distaff' side” ns Roland, Erie's medical student sou, puts it, Erie maintains her poise beneath the crotchety pin-pricking of her 75-ycar-old mother (Mrs llowlcy), her sister Kellie’s self pitying plaints, the temperamental somersaults of her sister Liz —dashing and wayward (Mrs Ashwell) —tho mercurial Alix. her attractive daughter (Peggy Waldegrave), whose dilemma is the choice between the wealthy Charles Hubbard (Roland Allison) and the brilliant but impecunious Toby (N. M. Nash), to say nothing about her encounters with her cousins, Theresa (Mrs Small) and Christopher (Frank Bendall), and the incursion of Liz’s “past” in the form of Gillie (Ken Struthers).