“WINGS OVER EUROPE”

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 584, 9 February 1929, Page 24

“WINGS OVER EUROPE”

A Distinctive Play

SCIENCE AND IDEALISM

"Wings Over Europe,*’ recently performed in New York by the Theatre

Guild, is hailed as one of the most distinctive plays of the year. In its poetry, “Wings Over Europe* has the chaste beauty of science; in its idealism, the vision of international peace. The authors. Robert Nichols, an English poet, and Maurice Browne, a crusading actor, have set oh a Promethean figure against the British Cabinet.

Francis Lightfoot, a lover of Shelley and d genius in science, has discovered, how to control the atom; and being aware of the tremendous implications of his discovery, he confides it to the Cabinet before he gives his secret machine to the world. For although control of the atom means that humanity is now gloriously ireed from all materialistic considerations in life, is also means that great power is put in the hands of the vicious. Indeed, young Lightfoot represents in himself both the possibilities and the perils.

His first impulse is to devote his discovery to the beneficence of mankind, to solve a,JI the earthly problems at once, so that men may cultivate the spirit. But when the cautious British Cabinet begins pompously to cavil, Lightfoot loses his faith in mankind and decides to use his machine for complete destruction. Man, he concludes, is nature’s failure. As a last resort the most pugnacious member of the Cabinet kills Lightfoot, to defer the day of judgment to a time more opportune for his own cowardly generation.