Word: campton
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...plays for voices" in a theatre is not necessarily a bad idea, as Dylan Thomas and Charles Laughton, alone and with supporting actors, have proved and proved again. Samuel Beckett's All That Fall, the most important work on the Poet's bill, is avowedly a radio play. David Campton's two curtain-raisers, A Smell of Burning and Memento Mori, also depend almost entirely upon dialogue and sound effects. The faults of the three lie not in their form but in their functioning: though competently made and well staged and acted, their impact is weak...
...Campton's A Smell of Burning and Memento Mori diverge from realism to comic fantasy. They are short and slight in form, and amiably gruesome in tone. Both are clever jobs, but each is composed of one joke, not a very funny joke at that, spun out far too thinly...
...fault of the Poets' if none of the three plays is very effective. The directors (Mary Manning for Beckett's, William Driver for Campton's) have not much opportunity to he helpful, since no movement at all is really necessary. But their efforts at staging are intelligently modest, and it must be credited to them that the performances are almost uniformly good. DeFrench and Greely Curtis are convincingly miserable in All That Fall, and William Driver and Hope Christopoulos do right by Cockney accents in A Smell of Burning. Stanley Jay gives the best performance of the evening in Momento...