Dr. S. RAMASWAMY
Department of English,
Douglas Stewart is a well-known literary
figure from
The origins of the radio verse play go back
to the ’Twenties and early ’Thirties. People who had reservations about verse
plays being successful on the stage could easily see their potential for the
radio.
“The Fire on the Snow” is a documentary play about
the British Antarctic Expedition of 1910. It was first performed in 1941. The
source of the play was Scott’s Diary and Apsley
Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the
World. The characters in the play are Captain Robert Falcon Scott, leader
of the expedition, Edward Adrian Wilson, chief of the scientific. staff, Captain Laurence, Lieutenant Bowers and petty officer
Evans. In addition to these five characters there is an Announcer. The play is
prefaced by a Prologue to be spoken in a different voice from that of
the Announcer in the play. It is this emphasis on the “Voice” throughout the
play that makes it an admirable radio play. The Announcer in this play not only
serves the purpose of the chorus but establishes unerringly the context for the
radio broadcasts. The historical information is supplied in the Prologue to
the listeners so that they may be able to comprehend the situation – “Captain
Scott’s Antarctic expedition landed on the Antarctic continent on 4th January
1911. The march to the Pole began from their base camp at
They have been out on the ice more than a
hundred days.
They have marched on the ice for over a
thousand miles.
They saw their dream topple and crash like a
wave
And waste itself on the bitter shore of the
Pole;
They remember Evans, dying with staring eyes;
They suffered from hunger; shortage of fuel
at the depots.
Proving that plans could foil, shook them and
chilled them.
They withheld their hands but not their grief
and horror
When Oates walked out to
the storm.
They remember his face.
They remember his form, stumbling beside the
sledge.
Struggling and stumbling. It is hard to
believe he is dead.
In spite of the apparent matter of factness of the voice of the Announcer, the poetry is not
throughout of the same type. Some of the lines are extremely short but charged
with a quiet emotional tone –
Death is leaping,
And calm escaping,
And the final shaping;
And death is nothing
But stopping breathing.
The poetry that is given to the Captain of
the expedition Scott, is distinguished from the kind
of poetry that is given to the Announcer. With extraordinary ease, Douglas
Stewart lifts the level of poetry to a higher level where it bristles with
suggestive powers–
If we had a shovel handy,
To shovel away the snow that’s inside my
head,
That’s where it’s falling now. My brain is a
snowdrift.
Somewhere deep down there’s a fire. I can
almost see it
Red
under masses of snow.
It is at this level
that we have to see the relevance of the title of the play – “The Fire on the Snow.” The Announcer in the very first speech of the play refers to the men of
the Antarctic expedition as – “these five men struggling / Like dark tough flames on the snow.” The nature of the journey of these
adventurous men, in spite of the remarkable understatement of Oates “It’s not a
Sunday school picnic, the march we’re going,” is given its full stature when
Wilson says – “Endurance may have a meaning / For
men in the snow as for saints and martyrs in flames.” The last lines of the
play are spoken by Scott
Two dead men; and a
dying man remembering
The
burning snow, the crags towering like flame.
It was the great
success of the first radio verse play of Douglas Stewart “The Fire on the
Snow” which
encouraged him to write the second, “The Golden Lover” with which he
won the competition for radio verse plays conducted in 1942. “The
Golden Lover” was first performed in 1943.
The story of Tawhai and her golden lover Whana
of which this play is a free interpretation, is told in James Cowan’s “Faery Folk Tales
of the Maori.” “The Fire on the Snow” was realistic – because it is a
historical document. “The Golden Lover” is a fantasy. Tawhai
was a young Maori woman and Whasna was one of the “people
of the mist”, the fairies of Maori legend. This delightful comedy is more than
twice as long as the earlier play and is divided into seven scenes. The play
again is poetic drama. The tone for the play is set right at the beginning when
we are introduced to the heroine of the play Tawhai
and her ridiculous husband Ruarangi.
Tawhai: You gurgled and
whistled all night like a boiling spring.
Ruarangi: I have never snored in
my life. I have known myself
For longer than you have, remember.
Tawhai: I have been your wife
Two years, Ruarangi,
and every night you have snored.
Ruarangi: By immemorial custom I
may snore, if I please.
The light bantering tone
so suitable to comedy is maintained throughout the play. The simple story of Tawhai, Ruarangi her husband and Whana the “golden lover” is told with classic simplicity
and unsullied tenderness and feeling for the simple eloquence of the naturally
gifted unsophisticated people. The poetry that wells forth straight from the heart lends a natural dignity to the
homely utterance of these children of nature. The “Man of the mist” – Whana, the golden lover, gives expression to his love of Tawhai
in the following lines:
When the tui sings,
The bell through the
green of the forest, clear and deep,
Some form arises
trembling among the music
Like a silver ghost,
my darling. You are the ghost.
When the Kowhai breaks
into flower and the honied blossoms
Flow down to the earth
in a waterfall still and silent
Some form that is not
a tree laughs there and sings
And
bathes her hair and her hands in the golden pool:
Your
hair and your hands, your heart of the spring and its flowers.
A green spirit in the
forest, a dark in the earth,
A fire of silver
burning now with the stars–
Tawhai,
Tawhai, you are all the earth and heavens.
It is this spontaneous
overflow of powerful feeling expressed in musical poetry that simply sings its
way into the hearts of the listeners like the tui’s
song that makes this radio play an extremely enjoyable audio experience. Even
the ordinarily dull Ruarangi is stirred by vague
intimations of Beauty when he realises, what an
enchanting creature he has for a wife–
In my folly I forgot
that her hands that grubbed in the field
Were
a dance of light like sunlight moving through water.
In my blindness I did
not see that her curling hair
That took the steam of
the pot was a dark river
All down the rapid of
her back; in my sleep and deafness
I did not know that
her voice was a well of water
Sweeter
than the singing river in the gloom of my whare.
Tawhai chooses to stay back where she belongs, with her husband and with the
other Maories, rather than go away with her golden lover.
More than ever before she realises that “we are such
stuff as dreams are made on” and she says–
Never will I forget
this man of the mist
Who struck at my heart
like a golden hawk from the sky.
to which she gets the reply –
Aye, cherish your
dream. It is true while it lasts.
The whole play “The
Golden Lover” has a dreamlike etherial quality
about it which has a hold on our hearts, almost surreptitiously working from
within and suddenly breaking in on our conciousness
so that we too will cherish this dream of a play.
Plays which are
panoramic in scope where the voice of the speaker could give a verbal picture
so that this incentive to imagination could work most effectively on the mind
of the listener, are especially suited for the radio
broadcasts. The sheer vastness, chill and white wilderness of the Antarctic and
the magnificent natural scenery and the ethereal fairy tale atmosphere are
immensely suitable to be dealt with through the medium of the radio play and
thus we have “The Fire on the Snow” and “The Golden Lover” by
Douglas Stewart.