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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria University College, Wellington N.Z. Vol. 20, No. 13. September 12, 1957

Local Talent Wins

Local Talent Wins

The Drama Competition was won this year by Auckland, with a very able and imaginative production of "Machine Song." a play by a New Zealander. A. S. Coppard. The competition was marred by unhappy judging, but one hardly would have seen fit to quarrel with their decisions had it not been for the comments with which they were accompanied. Certainly its production was the most effective of the three I saw. The set was fine—grey oblong shapes looming up into the darkness to suggest the angular melancholy of a deserted factory, a machine relentlessly turning out bolts in the foreground, and its solitary operator, bewildered by his own imagination. The play, however, has a crippling disadvantage when compared with "Modern Times": it is deadly serious. Indeed it is the highest praise of the performance of the machine-operator, and of the production in its use of the machine, a booming voice in the background, and the conflicting influences (which took the guise of a barmaid, and angel, an agitator, etc., and were concealed within the oblong shapes) to say that there was no time to think about the play until the tension was over, and it was only then that one realised what a terribly hackneyed play it had been.