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French repartee

NZSPA Drama Reporter Christchurch — Modern, preferably French and with the emphasis en the absurd —this seems to be the preference of drama groups in New Zealand's universities for plays to open the season.

Not all fall into this category One university dramatic group is presenting an open-air Shakespeare while Otago's orientation effort is a satirical revue.

Avant-garde absurd, in the best Gallic traditions—this is Boris Vian's "The Empire Builders the Canterbury University Dramatic Society's [unclear: Orien] offering.

The plot? A simple family pursued by a hideous noise and haunting faceless being, the Sehmurz, moves higher and higher up the stairs of their apartment building. The meaning Everything and nothing banally obvious and fraught with mystifications, say the producers.

Said the Christchurch Press: "There are moments when I wonder if I am simply playing with words", confesses the father in the "Empire Builders, and the audience may at times have wondered the same about Vian himself."

The play was not performed in the University's new Ngaio Marsh Theatre to enable Dame Ngaio to produce the first play in the auditorium.

Victoria also went into the absurd a la Francaise, but chose a better charted path Albert Camus author of Cross Purposes Victoria's production, is a world-famous novelist of considerable stature.

The plot is based on a Central European legend—the long absent son who stays at the inn run by his mother and sister who not recognising him, despatch him for money, in the same way as they murder their other guests.

Camus diagnoses humanity's plight as purposeless in an existence out of harmony with its surrounding In fact it was Camus who brought "absurd" into the critic's jargon.

The play can be faulted for its surfeit of philosophy and dearth of action Concluded M.H., "Salient drama critic: "Good actors art hampered by a play that is drawn out and finishes on an unsatisfactory and gimmicky note."

So much for a Nobel Prize-winning novelist.

Also in the same vein is Auckland University's "Next Time I'll Sing to You," already assured of success with student audiences after Otago's Arts Festival entry of 1965, Not French admittedly James Saunders' "play within a play" basically considers the nature of happiness and portrays this through a troupe of theatricals who act out the life of a famous English hermit and gradually identify with their subject.

Another Auckland effort is still under wraps. The Theatre Company is tackling Jean Anouilh (of "Antigone" and "Becket" fame) at his toughest in "Poor Bites," the sordid little black comedy of a present-day aristocrat (French "Sade" style) mho humbles and breaks the Duritan Bites at an eighteenth-century costume party, using all the best eighteenth-century techniques.

A play you either loathe or detest to paraphrase Kenneth Tyran, but the actors are competent enough for this nasty little piece de theatre.

In the cast are Michael Noonan, well known at both Otago and Auckland and perhaps the best actor to have come out of the universities this decade fellow-trouper Phil Thwaites AKTV2 "Town and Around" man Tom Finlayson also well known in southern centres, and Michael Devine, who has alternated between professional theatre and the NZBC.

Once upon a time we could have said absurd and meant far-fetched but funny. Perhaps the Bard would like the term applied to "Loves Labours Lost," even if Camus would not use the word for the masters comedies.

Rehearsals are now well under may for the Massey Drama Society's most ambitious venture so far— their open-air production of Shakespeare's Loves Labours Lost," to be staged in Massey's beautiful Wharerata Gardens in April.

The play is an ideal choice for students open-air show. All the action is set out of doors in the King of Navarre's park; the costuming is of the later Elizabethan period—one of the most colourful and graceful ages the history of fashion; the characters run the whole gamut of comedy parts from witty couriers to bawdy clowns: and, most fitting of the play is a light-hearted skit on universities and the conflict between love and learning.