Inordinate Demands

The play could usefully have made more of William Juliff as the narrator and participator (becoming within the play an audience for the action). He provided a very pleasant point of reference.

The Possessed, however, was making inordinate demands on the actors' interpretive capacities. They should not have had to recreate or make up for the inadequacies of the text.

So, although there were creditable performances all round, these once more did not add up to any final conception of unity-in-diversity, so necessary to the acceptance of the play and the production as a meaningful demonstration of the absurd or something more than melodramatically entertaining. This was the qualified success of almost paradoxically serious melodrama.

Yet these quibbles give perhaps an unfair picture. This really was a most stimulating and memorable evening in the theatre and Nola Millar managed to overcome remarkable difficulties in the Nineteenth Century English script to make it possible. All credit to her that the play so vividly came alive in its third-remove existence.