12 JUNE 1947, Page 13

ON THE AIR

IN common with a great many other people, I used to consider Saint loan Mr. Shaw's Masterpiece. Of late years my opinion has changed, and last week's broadcast in World Theatre confirmed ma in my doubts. Indeed, hearing the play by radio—and it broadcasts exceedingly well—brought into sharp focus the cause of my dissatisfaction. The core and essence of Joan's achievement was, surely, the mysterious power she possessed to make men do her bidding—men of all sorts and conditions, from the most ignorant of common soldiers to the Dauphin of France himself. What was her secret? My complaint is that Mr. Shaw makes no attempt to answer the question; indeed, he shamelessly evades it. Several of his characters remark, " There's something about the girl," or words to that effect, but we are never told, nor shown, what that some- thing is. The truth is, I suppose, that Mr. Shaw, with characteristic zest in his .self-appointed office as champion of the unpopular, was more interested to explain the motives of the Maid's judges than to explain the Maid herself. They have been execrated by history; she has been canonised. Thus it is that the cathedral and trial scenes, with their conflict of beliefs and clash of ideologies, were immensely impressive on the air, while the earlier scenes, depicting the successive stages of Joan's triumph, were, I thought, rather less convincing. Val Gielgud, the producer, had at his command a cast of uniform excellence. Miss Constance Cummings gave a splendidly vital performance as Joan, but her Joan was merely a peasant girl, with hardly a glimmer of the spirituality which the real Joan must have possessed. Personally—and quite unreasonably —I found that her accent and intonation sometimes jarred. But did not Sir John Squire once suggest that Mr. Shaw's Joan was more American than French?

Like the Scotsman of legend, the Third Programme jokes with difficulty. Its latest effort in this direction, the Barsley-Worsky Guide to Britain, was better than some, but still missed its target. It seemed to me to take an unconscionable time to get going, and no sooner had it settled down into its stride than it reached the end of its allotted time and tamely petered out, ending "not with a bang but a whimper." At first I thought it was going to fall as flat as so many Third Programme pleasantries have done, but the second half was a vast improvement on the first. There was some genuinely effective satire in the sketch of a verger showing a party of American tourists round " St. Jude's the Obscure," in the nationalised hiking episode, in the folk-song burlesques, and in the presentation of football pools as the national sport of rural England. But the whole thing sprawled, untidily and formlessly. Pulled together and tightened up, it might have been a really entertaining piece of tomfoolery; as it was, it was merely a collection of bits and pieces, too many of which lacked sparkle and wit.

I don't know how old W. J. Turner was when he wrote The Man who ate the Popomack, but it seems to me to be obviously a young man's play. It is so full of ideas that they come bubbling out with an exuberance that sometimes makes for incoherence. Tho performance broadcast in the Third Programme on Saturday was a recording of the production put out in the Home Service some months ago. How such a play managed to stray into the Home Service when its spiritual home is clearly the Third Programme, I cannot imagine. But whether one listened to it with a full apprecia- tion of its philosophical content, or merely as a lark, it was an exhilarating experience. In some respects I thought the production was a little lacking in clarity; now and again I found myself not quite sure which character was speaking.

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Introducing London Magazine, which succeeds In Town Tonight on Saturday evenings in the Home Service, the Lord Mayor suggested that it should aim at giving listeners " some idea of the greatness, the power and the fascination of London." If it is to realise this high aim it will have to improve on the first issue, in which the only really first-rate item was a talk by a road-sweeper whose name I could not catch. At any rate, the new programme seems to have renounced some of the more blatant inanities of In Town Tonight; but why, oh why, is an audience of studio stooges considered necessary? L. C. LLOYD.