Ivor Novello Criticises Australia.

Waikato Times, Volume 113, Issue 18850, 21 January 1933, Page 16 (Supplement)

Ivor Novello Criticises Australia.

“Unconvincing, and too wildly exaggerated to be taken as a serious study of New Australia in Old Bel-gravia”-—this is a characteristic newspaper criticism of Ivor Novello's comedy, “Fresh Fields” in London. It is being produced with a brilliant cast, including Lilian Braithwaite. Brisbane publicans, “bulging with bullion and bad manners,” become the paying guests of an impoverished ducal famijy. The Yorkshire Observer declares that the Anglo-Australian clash unfolds excitement equal to a test match. Australia appropriately wins in the end with marriage into the aristocracy. The Star doubts whether a family of aborigines would behave so clumsily as Novello’s rich Australian vulgarians. Novello, the author, told the Sydney Sun representative that he never wanted to visit Australia. He had seen many Australians in London and found them as clumsy and crude as the lypes which the play depicts. Fnglish society, he assorts, often speaks of wealthy Australians as making fools of themselves. The Mod ern Way. Josephine Wray, Covent Garden soprano, left Croydon Aerodrome rccenlly to fly through a gale to Halifax, where she, sang in “The Valkyrie” a I the Yorkshire Opera Festival. She llesv hack for her London engagement llic same, night.