LACK OF IMAGINATION

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 20168, 9 June 1928, Page 6

LACK OF IMAGINATION

pDLLOWING the "Dawn” controversy in England, yet another complaint against the Lord Chamberlain, acting as censor of stage plays, has arisen.

His department has advised a producer that a play recently submitted will be passed “on the understanding that the torture scene is modified to the extent of omitting entirely the tearing off of the dress of Ruth and the actual production of the redhot iron.” The producer complains bitterly that these modifications will spoil his play—he desperately wants his real, redhot iron, and he promises, in a protest to the Lord Chamberlain, that "it shall not be placed within dangerous reach of the girl’s flesh.”

But is this acting or poker-work? Is the audience supposed to have no imagination at all? Hundreds of scenes of prospective torture, from the one in "King John” onwards, have been played out with cold irons and the pretence that they were heated: why seek to change the tradition now The producer’s answer is a good deal more serious than his trivial complaint. In effect, he asserts that it is admitted that the modern "crime drama” is entitled to the closest approximation to hideous realities, and he asks why he may not use a red-hot iron when other producers have been permitted by the censor to show a hanged man disappearing through the trap below a scaffold, or a "death chair” with its occupant finished off by electrocution.

It is the old argument, rarely received with much respect even in a nursery, that two blacks make a white, but it does suggest that there is a contemporary taste for the cruder and less imaginative forms of horror, and that the censor is prepared to make queer concessions to it. But why should we want crude horrors, and why should the censor, if there is to be a censor at all, sometimes choose to support the demand? In spite of all modern advances in many other directions it looks as though the theatre-going imagination must be duller than it was 30 years ago.