A MUCH-DISCUSSED PLAY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23702, 9 January 1939, Page 10

A MUCH-DISCUSSED PLAY

MERTON HODGE “A BOLD MAN ” MR CARROLL’S APPRECIATION (From Our Own Correspondent) LONDON, Dec. 15. After having read so many unappreciative press criticisms of Dr Merton Hodge’s adaptation of Olive Schreiner’s classic, it is refreshing to read what Mr Sydney Carroll has to say to-day.' The majority of the dramatic critics went to see this play —a good play, too, by the way—without possessing one iota of knowledge of the story they went to criticise, and among them were those who seemed to be particularly proud of their ignorance. The dramatic critic of Punch, writing this week, is yet another who confesses that he has never read Olive Schreiner’s best selling kopje book on which the play ‘Story of an African Farm ” is based.

“If I had,” he writes, “ perhaps the fun of looking for old friends and comparing scenes with the private personal pictures which spririg up in reading would have made me feel differently about the play. For I found it dull, and so, I think, would anyone not devoted either to Olive Schreiner or the veldt. If one may guess, Mr Merton Hodge, the adapter, must have been sadly torn between loyalty to the atmosphere of the book and his natural desire as an experienced dramatist to work up some kind of cumulative interest. Unless popular novels are so overwhelmingly suggestive of the theatre as was ‘The Constant Nymph,’ that is usually the difficulty of shifting them there. ... In the case of

Mr Hodge loyalty has won, or so I imagine; had the book offered more substantial material which would fit into the mould of the theatre, then I am sure he would have used it.” Africa Comes to Town

To-day, Mr Sydney W. Carroll discusses in the Daily Telegraph this “ Play of Atmosphere," and this is his considered verdict: — When Merton Hodge, the young New Zealand doctor-dramatist undertook to adapt Olive Schreiner’s “Story of an African Farm ” for the stage, he showed himself a bold man.

Famous novels are always hard to dramatise, and this fiery onslaught on the proprieties and conventions of its time, written by one of the pioneers of the women’s rights movement, was more difficult than most. /

Dr Hodge has succeeded, despite many serious obstacles, in capturing its atmosphere, its principal characters, and its psychological purpose to an extent that no critic familiar with all the many com-: plicated threads of the original tale could ever conceive possible.

With the assistance of that brilliant producer, Basil Dean, and a very remarkable all-round company of players, old and young, Mrs T. C. Dagnall has presented to us at the New Theatre a conglomerate, sec-tional-sided, many-toned blend of melodrama, comedy and colonial picture play that is always vivid, often anger making, tear causing, and yet punctuated liberally with laughter. It has a humanity and an individuality of its own, an appreciation of life on the kopie and upon the veldt, in the farmhouse and in the wagon such as only a colonial eye could visualise and only a colonial mind could depict. Rascality Unredeemed

( The temperament of Olive Schreiner was not very well suited to a proper appreciation of contemporary stage pictures of human life. She believed that every character should be duly marshalled and j ticketed. There seldom, accordj ing to her doctrine, any_ variability ‘ or indecision of vice or virtue. Take, ! for example, her portrait, if it may I so be called, of her Dickensian-like | rascal, Bonaparte Blenkins. Here 1 is the 100 per cent, scoundrel. It is ! not enough for him to be a mealyi mouthed hypocrite, a liar, a toady, a bully, a greedy loafer, he must be cruel just for the mere love of cruelty, destroy for the simple joy in destruction, whip for the lust of whipping. He is also a sponger, a seducer, and a drunkard. What more, apart from a murderer, could the most ardent champion of woman’s cause desire him to be? A Side Issue But the play, let me make clear, only concerns this priceless old ruffian as a side issue. The main motive is the character of Lyndall, the young independent, ambitious, serious projection of the novelist herself This is a girl willing to be wooed, but not to be wed, content to be the free companion and help-mate of a man, but not his possession, fighting continually against her passions and her sentiment; cold as ice in her mind, disdainful of man’s pity and so-called generosity, scornful of love, yet ready to be taken care of so long as freedom was always to hand. If any criticism is to be made of Dr Hodge’s work it must be that we do not see enough of Lyndall and realise sufficiently the complexities of her nature. Amongst the figures of the farm, Tant Sannie, the old Boer woman farmer, admirably played by Mary Clare, is a gripping and arresting portrait. Curigwen Lewis and Alexis France are delightful as the two young girls, and Aubrey Dexter has no hesitation in his application of the colouring to Blenkins. But it is to the play as a whole that the imagination is directed. With Clifford Pember’s settings, Miss Haffenden’s costumes, and Ernest Irving’s music, it now offers in its altered and revised form a refreshing and moving entertainment of atmosphere and period, finishing with an hilarious reproduction of a Boer wfedding. We are reminded that we may do worse than look up our histories and re-read some of the great novels of the past, especially those that have played a part in our social developments.