REPRESSIONS FREED

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 77, Issue 35, 10 February 1934, Page 3

REPRESSIONS FREED

REMEDIES FOR TEMPER. Dame Sybil Thorndike, lecturing In fhe Chiswick Empire Theatre on “The Place of the Theatre in Daily Life,” told her audience that when she was playing in “The Medea” her family and her friends all remarked on what “a sweet, good-tempered creature” she had become, says the Daily Mail. ‘“That,” she declared, “was because 1 was able to give expression to all my bad temper in the part I was playing, which is the great value and function of the theatre. “We all need a means of release, a treeing of ourselves from the harmful things within us. Actors get this in the playing of their parts, but audiences get it, too, if they take their proper share in the performance by shedding their personalities, prejudices, and ambitions, and sinking their identities in those of the characters in the piece. “ Io do that we have to find some point of contact in the personality of each character. And that is to our gain, for the more persons in this world we can feel a heart-throb with, the more wealthy we are.” As a further illustration Dame Sybil said that all her Life she had suffered from nightmares and gone in terror of the dark. But when ten or eleven years ago she had played in Grand Guignol at the Little Theatre, through out the two years of those plays of horror she never had one nightmare, and had lost all her fear of darkness. “And what is more,” she added, ‘‘l had letters from members of my audiences who said that they, too, by seeing some particular fear of their own personified on the stage had been freed from it and enabled to throw it off. j There are untold depths in each of us I to which we never give an outlet or a release unless we go to the theatre and I allow it to provide us with the means lof giving liberty to our repressed feel•J ings.''