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Timaru Herald, Volume CXLII, Issue 20587, 28 November 1936, Page 14 (Supplement)

Miss Elizabeth Loe, the British Drama League tutor, who acted as critic at the Auckland junior festival of drama in July, has lately produced Keith Winter’s "The Shining Hour” for the Hawke’s Bay Little Theatre Society. She has now been asked to produce “The Last of Mrs Cheney” for a group of amateurs, in aid of the Hawke’s Bay East Aero Club.

When the Chief Secretary in New South Wales banned Clifford Odet’s play, “Till the Day I Die,” it might have been supposed that the young American dramatist had suffered a setback. Not so. On the night when he sent his policemen on to the stage of the Savoy Theatre, Mr Chaffey placed the mettlesome Odets on the map Had that performance by the New Theatre League been allowed to run its course unmolested, few people outside the league’s trusty followers would have bothered about the play or its author. But, as a result of the publicity which the policeman and the prosecution and the protest received, the New Theatre League has been able to fill its private playhouse with 400 invited spectators once every week. People of all political persuasions, all professions and all ranks of society have seen “Till the Day I Die.” Nothing attracts an audience so quickly as a book, a play, or a film which has been prohibited by the authorities. Not only has “Till the Day I Die” run a stubborn, if subterranean, course; but the New Theatre League will shortly present a second play by Mr Odets, entitled “Paradise Lost.” Not long after that, even so socially correct an organisation as the Independent Theatre will busy Itself with an Odets drama. This drama is “Awake and Sing!” Meanwhile, the Chief Secretary’s onslaught against “Till the Day I Die” has got Itself featured in the theatre section of the “New York Times.” Under the two-column heading, “Australia Versus Odets,” that influential journal gives a satirical account of the skirmish. “Protecting the people is quite an industry here,” says its correspondent, “where there are more books banned than anywhere else in the world save, possibly. the Irish Free State.” “Paradise Lost” deals with the slow death of the middle class in a contracting economic system. Taking as his central character a small manufacturer with kindly instincts and liberal political opinions, Mr Odets shows how the world slowly closes round this man, bearing down hardest on his children, who cannot establish themselves in the social scheme. This central figure does not realise what is happening until he has lost his homely little paradise, which is supported by an income from business, and sheltered by a rambling dwelling.