TWO PLAYS

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18617, 12 July 1930, Page 15

TWO PLAYS

! MOVING PIECES OF WORK. “The Last Enemy,” by Frank Harvey (Allen and Unwin). “Charles and Mary,” by Joan Temple (Allen and Unwin). Of ’’The Last Enemy” Mr. Tanner Swaffer, the well-known dramatic -t* tic remarks: “It is a fine drama. . * If the “The Last Enemy” fails, I see little hope for the future of the English theatre.” The play opens with the last moments of two members of an Antarctic exploring party who have been trapped by a blizzard, an older and a younger man. Together they go out

. . . and the next scene is “The First Landing,” inevitably reminiscent, in idea though not in treatment, of “Outward Bound.” The main play concerns the doings of very ordinary people in war-time, but when a crisis arises help comes from the dead explorers. It is very difficult in reading a play to gauge its effect on an audience. There seems to the reader a lack of cohesion. The connection between the dead and the living is not made clear enough, nor does the dialogue give quite the feeling of the naturalness and inevitability of which wo are conscious in reading “Journey's End.” Still it is a sincere and moving piece of work, which, whether It achieves success or not .certainly deserves it.

Few of the great tragic romances of fact or fiction touch the heart more deeply than the story of Charles Lamb’s devotion, so passionately returned, to his afflicted sister, Mary. If the Essays of Elia and the Letters had not endeared their author to thousands of readers his life of selfabnegation, devoid of all showy tricks of martyrdom, would have gained him a special niche in the temple of true fame.

Miss Joan Temple, In “Charles and Mary,” gives a vivid picture of the accumulated irritations that drove poor Mary over the border-line of sanity to the dreadful deed which cast a shadow over all her after-life. The half-senile old father, the frigid mother, John, the elder brother, blatantly selfish and domineering, were directly responsible for Mary’s breakdown; but is was the

sensitive Charles who paid the penalty, Charles’ shadowy romance, foredoomed to frustration, is charmingly sketched. The whole play is a fitting tribute to a very gallant gentleman who achieved what he himself calls “the hardest lesson in life—to accept the commonplace

with fortitude, while romance passes by.”