Do not fail to make a point of listening to
the new. Miracle Play which is to be broadcast from St. Hilary Cornwall, on Tuesday night next. This little Cornish village has jumped into fame entirely on the strength of its broadcasts. For six years the villagers have broadcast a Nativity Play at Christmas, and the event is one of the highest lights in the year's programmes. (They have also broadcast in The Western Land and The Little Ass.) If Father Bernard Walke, who writes these plays, is their inspiration, Mr. Filson Young, who directs the broadcasts, is their guiding genius : without the latter's keen interest and quick eye for suitable and original broadcast matter, it is doubtful whether we should ever have heard of these delightful players. As it is, they provide a most welcome oasis of native simplicity in a desert of sophistication. To listen to the Nativity Play, as performed in this remote Cornish village, is to enjoy a naive reality such as rarely survives transmission by radio ; and one of the reasons for this is Mr. Young's insistence on the use of actual local sounds for his " effects." Tuesday's Miracle Play, The Eve of All Souls, is also written by Father Walke, and the performers include a farm-hand, a tin miner, a postman, and the champion butter-maker of Cornwall.
Previous page