SICK OF SEX PROBLEM PLAYS.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17837, 4 May 1926, Page 12

SICK OF SEX PROBLEM PLAYS.

LORD OXFORD WOULD WELCOME A CHANGE

(Special to the “Star.”) LONDON, March 21

Mr Scan O’Casey, the railway-worker playwright and author of “Juno and the Paycock,” and “The Plough and the Stars,” was yesterday presented at the Aeolian Hall with the Haw thorn den Literary Prize of £IOO by Lord Oxford and Asquith. Men and women of letters and playgoers gathered in large numbers to see the one-time dock labourer receive his reward. Scan O’Casev went to work, at a tender age, for 4s a week. Then he earned 9s as a newsagent, and his third job was on the railway. At 16 lie taught himself to read. The prize was instituted in 1919 by Miss Alice Warrcnder, sister of the late Admiral .Sir George Warrcnder, for the best work of imaginative literature published in the previous twelve months. Lord Oxford, in presenting the prize, said there was no department in which we and the rest of the world were so far behind, for the time being, as in new works of enduring quality for the drama. There was no department in which we and other countries were more in need of a fresh outlook. Playgoers were one of the most intelligent classes in the community, and they became sick of the reproduction of what was called the sex problem with its triangles and complexes, and its more or less thinly disguised indecency of language and situation. OUTWORN THEME. Wo should hail the prospect of emancipation from this too prolonged and now outworn interlude in the-history bf the drama. 1 Lord Oxford described “Juno and the Paycock” as the most moving, and impressive drama that we had seen for The play had the advantage of what he believed to be the finest company of actors, upon any stage in Europe at this moment. Mr Scan O'Casey had a great reception. He was dressed in a grey lounge suit with a vari-coloured cardigan. His first sentences were fervently spoken in Gaelic. It would be, he said, a happy memento of his visit to England, and, to use his own words, “a very darling example” of his visit. Lady Gregory, who did much to encourage the young dramatist, gave an interesting outline of Sean O’Casey's career.