PLAYS AND PLAYERS LONG AGO IN NEW ZEALAND.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23157, 1 October 1938, Page 1 (Supplement)

PLAYS AND PLAYERS LONG AGO IN NEW ZEALAND.

By CECIL F. HULL

"-A. SORROW'S crown of sorrow is remembering happier things." This hackneyed Tennysonian quotation, like most generalisations, contains more'falsehood than truth. Reminiscence is often a way of escape. Burrowing in the bright sand of a happy * past,. we throw up a sort of defensive barrier against the grim realities of the intruding present. For in spite of its material drawbacks and discomforts, the p'ast of half a century ago and less possesses for many of us in retrospect that thing more to be desired than many inventions, the sense of tranquil stability for ever lost to the ■world to-d»y. Of what comfort is the wonder of television if.it shows us the horrors of modern warfare, the conquest of the air that enables bombs to be dropped on defenceless heads, the subdual of the ether to the task of recording from every quarter of the globe mutual suspicions, hatred and fears? Before the Queue System I am well aware that the ostrich is a foolish bird, that the good old days contained many festering abuses, and that it is perhaps not good for the soul of man to be materially secure. Not long ago Mr. H. G. Wells congratulated the young on having been born in the, present age, an age in which—l forget his exact words—it is dangerous, for men to be alive, but in which at least they really are alive. I observe and admire, that dauntless, eternally questing spirit, but I pursue

Some Notable Personalities -- Recalled

the more cowardly course. I shut the door for a moment upon the frightening present and am back in iny own student days of more than thirty years ago. ' - . - ■ The scene is a southern university town, the time and place the annual Easter tournament. Those old favourites, the Pollard Opera Company, were putting on "The Country Girl," and a big crowd, including many undergraduates, was surging round the pit doors of the old theatre. There was no queue system in those bad old days, and if danger is a necessary sauce to enjoyment, it was potentially present in. that. milling , throng. As the doors opened there" was an irresistible forward- thrust. In my- inexperience, my arms were down by my side, and suddenly I was conscious of the crowd as a vast, impersonal force which would crush its victims as surely ? and unthinkingly as a roaring wall of water smashes out the life of a puny sailor. Helped by a hastily formed cordon of men students, I survived, and a moment later was shot through the doorway of the theatre in wild disorder, but, with the resilience of youth, laughing and conscious only of the enjoyment to come. Old Stage Favourites How well we knew the personalities in those travelling companies I With the infrequent visits of flesh-and-blood actors to-day no such intimacy is possible. Shall we ever forget the Beattys, May and Maud, that great little comedian, W. S. Percy (who now lives permanently in England and has rather surprisingly become an authority upon the!beauties of the English countryside)

and his partner, Quealy (I cannot remember his initials), whose style of humour made him an excellent foil for Percy ? I wonder if anyone else still recalls one of his gags in Aucklaud. The programme of trotting meetings at what is now called Alexandra Park, then used to contain at least one pony race, and rightly or wrongly, the running in these events was helieved to be not entirely above suspicion. So Quealy upon the stage, with race-glasses glued to his eyes, cries out: "A wonderful sight, Mother! A marvellous sight! I see a pony-race at Potter's Paddock and everyone of them triers!" But the performance in Dunedin was of a later date , and was possibly , the work of a Williamson or Musgrove Company. At all events, George Lauri was the star comedian. I remember him best as a strong-minded female inciting her fellow-women to revolt against the common enemy, Alan. Across the years when many more improving homilies have become a total loss, floats that speech, miraculously preserved: Miss Emma Temple

"Strike for freedom, my sisters, and when you strike, have something in your hand, if it is only the fender. Before marriage a man takes a girl out in the moonlight. After marriage he leaves her at home doing the washing with a bar of Sunlight. What does a man marry a woman for? Why, to sew on his buttons! And what I say to you, my sisters, is this: 'Don't sew on his buttons. Let him go without buttons and then down will come his —dignity and independence!'" Naive and simple stuff, 1 suppose. What the youth of to-day with a cynical twist of the lips would call "clean British humour." But cheerful vulgarity is often a better tonic than cynical suggestiveness. Like Kipling's three-decker novel, it had the merit of "taking tired people to the Island of the Blest." !

Then there were the Broughs, that attractive and distinguished couple who used to tour New Zealand with draw-ing-room comedies such as • "The Amazons" and "The Liars." Old playgoers will not forget, too, Mrs. Brough's sister, Miss Emma Temple, whose crisp acting and excellent sense of humour contributed greatly to the success of the company. Voice From the Pit ■ But for the masses, the Broughs could not compete in popularity with the Bland Holt melodramas of the good old "thud and "blunder"'"schoblTxhey had thrilling names, such as "The Tenthirty Down Express." The motherless heroine, a picture of youthful innocence —and inanity—might be seen'pleading with her unaccountably aged father who -tottered about the stage urging upon her marriage with the villain to prevent the foreclosure of the mortgage on .the ancestrar home. Stage law with its strange conventions usually brought sorrow upon the heqd of the ingenue. The hero, dashing but dumb, was never a match for the mustachioed villain whose machinations, however, always failed, in the end. Though he held all the legal cards, he invariably lost, the rubber. I suppose .tho "serials" in the cinemas to-day , are the legitimate descendants of those artless productions. The growth of a town into a city brings many amenities in its train, but there are inevitable disadvantages inseparable from size, and though parochialism is to be-deprecated, yet a place where, to put it largely, everyone knows everyone else, has tho charm of intimacy one finds in a large family. This intimacy was nowhere better illustrated than at theatrical performances. From the safe obscurity of the pit friendly chaff and friendly abuse greeted socially, financially or perhaps only physically, prominent figures as they filed into the orchestra stalls. And there must be many city fathers of today who are all the better for the outspoken advice tendered to them in those far-off times. \