a.

Mme. Halina Czerny-Stefanska is shown here as she

arrived in Montreal to begin her Canadian tour. Accom-
panying her is Prof. L. Stefansky of the Cracow Acadamy

of Music.

Czerny-Stafanska

thrills city

He Czerny - Stefanska,

first of several artists from
the Soviet Union and the
People’s Democracies scheduled
to visit this city, thrilled a near-
capacity audience at Vancouver
Art Gallery auditorium last
Saturday evening. Although
the recital was arranged in less
than two weeks, the large at-
tendance indicated the wide in-
terest in her appearance: here.

Mme. Czerny-Stefanska, a
direct descendant of Beethoven’s
prize pupil, Karl Czerny, who
taught Franz Lizst, is the win-
ner of the world’s most covet-
ed pianistic honor: the Chopin
International Competition in
Warsaw (1949).

Her recital revealed a tech--
nique and sensitive insight such
as one is rarely privileged to
hear. A renowned authority on
Chopin, her interpretations ex-

‘tracted fresh and unexpected

subtleties from this oft-heard
music.

The program was devoted
solely to her specialty; ex-
cluding encores: including two
of the Ballades, and a lengthy
list of Polonaises, Nocturnes,
Mazurkas, and an Etude. Al-
though possibly an over-empha-
sis of Chopin for such a general
audience, she gripped every
single person with her imagin-
ative taste and exquisite beauty
of conception. Czerny-Stefan-
ska is truly one of the world-
ranking artists of our time.

Tentatively, the next pro-
grams in this series will be:

4

ONIZE
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410 Main St.

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audience

March 9: Bezrodni, renowned
Ukrainian violinist, accompan-
ied by baritone Hryshko from
the Kiev Opera, and colora-
tura Firsova, from the Bolshoi.

March 28: Emil Gilels, the
great Soviet pianist who has
just completed triumphant
tours of Europe, South Ameri-
can, and the United States.

BOOKS

Wondertul World of Mathematics

DRAMA

Festival honors goes to

best production -- and worst play

eae B.C. regional competition

of the 1956 Dominion Drama
Festival concluded last Satur-
day evening at York Theatre
here with a wonderfully sen-
sitive production of Sean O’
Casey’s Juno And The Paycock.
It marked the climax of thé
festival,

A higher average excellence ©

prevailed this year, but miss-
ing was a lofty triumph to
match The Crucible, with which
the UBC Players Alumni went
on to win the Dominion award
at Regina last year.

‘The Festival Trophy and $100
for the best play, and trophies
for best director, Ian Thorne,
and best supporting player,
Robert Clothier as Luigi, all
went to Vancouver Little
Theatre Association’s polished,
starkly cynical, Darkness At
Noon.

The adjudicator, British act-

ress Pamela Stirling, gave Ver-
lie Cooter (Juno Boyle in
June And The Paycock) the
best actress award, and Geoffrey
Theobald (Androcles in Andro-
cles and the Lion), the best
actor award.

Awards for the best set went
to David Jones (Lilliom), and
for the best comedy other than
the winning play, to Dark Sum-
mer. Curiously enough, the ad-
judicator declined to grant an
award for the second-place
drama.

tt Bos a

Perhaps the greatest dis-
appointment was the relatively
poor showing of last year’s fes-
tival winners. The UBC Play-
ers Alumni entered Lilliom, by
the Hungarian playwright,
Ferenc Molnar, but the pro-
duction was a contrast of good
and bad _ projections, faulty
tempos, and general thematic
uncertainty.

Unfortunately, the UBC Play-
ers missed the point — that it
is a lightly ironical parable —
and treated it as a melodrama,
while the  characterizations

lacked the necessary earthiness.
They were too glib and assured
for the types and milieu depic-
ted.

American playwright, Sidney
Kingsley’s Darkness at Noon,
like the Arthur Koestler novel
on which it is based, is a catec-
hism of hate unrelieved by
human sympathy or understand-
ing. Characterization is static,
subordinated to dogma rather
than organically growing and
finding its natural resolution.
_ Had the entire Company simp-
ly stood and chanted “Hate
Russia! Hate Russia!” there
could hardly have been less
variation of mood or dramatic
resolution. All the polished
technique and official acclaim
in the world cannot convert

such a_ tiresomely reiterated
political slogan into live
theatre.

Wednesday’s production by
the Little Theatre was exceed-
ingly well rehearsed. It was
meticulously timed. But it could
be convincingly only to those
who shared the playwright’s
cynicism. *

The White Rock Players’
Club, a fine community group
which functions the year round,
presented Shaw’s Androcles
And The Lion on' Thursday eve-
ning. They had some difficulty
in adapting to the unfamiliar
audience and surroundings, but
made up for it in group spirit
and warmth.

Wider outside experience com-
bined with more mature polish-
ing and analysis of their pro-
jects, this group could come up
with a winner next year.

The fourth evening found the
West Vancouver Little Theatre
Guild on the boards with an
English comedy-triangle, Wyn-
yard Browne’s Dark Summer.
As last year’s adjudicator,
Andre Van Gysegham, said of
Vancouver’s Little Theatre’s

entry of Gaig’s Wife, so Dark

Summer was also a ‘poor choice
for a festival production, al-

\

fascinating for children as well as adults

LANCELOT Hogben once wrote

an enormously popular and
fascinating book called Math-
ematics for the Million. Now,
after many years, he has fol-
lowed it with one that might be
called. “Mathematics for Every
Schoolchild.”

For in a large, magnificently
illustrated picture book, The
Wonderful World of Mathe-
matics, (available here at the
People’s Cooperative Bookstore,
337 West Pender Street, price
$3.49) Professor Hogben has now
told the story of mathematics

in a way that will entrance any-
body over the age of 12—in-

cluding grown-ups like myself,

who found Mathematics for the
Million far too difficult.

We hate mathematics at
school (or many of us do) be-
cause nobody thinks of explain-
ing the use of it all, or where
and why anybody thought of
algebra, square roots or log-
arithms.

This is just what Professor
Hogben has done, for the his-

tory of mathematics is really
the history of science.

Measuring things was from
the first an essential part of
mastering nature; men had to
learn to keep check of the time,
to watch the sun and moon and
seasons, to measure their fields
and their grain, to count, add
and multiply—in all of which
how helpful they found their
ten fingers !

For ‘centuries the Egyptian -

surveyors redivided the fields
of the Nile Valley every spring,
after the floods had washed
away the landmarks, by methods
of finding areas by triangles.

The priests of Babylon main-
tained their reputation for prop-
hecy by observing eclipses and
foretelling the next one.

When the peoples of the coast
began to sail abroad to trade,
they discovered that the earth

.was curved, not flat, and learnt

to chart the seas and skies.

And then the argumentative
Greeks came along and insisted
on proving the rule-of-thumb

methods by logic—for instance,
why “the square of the hypot-
enuse must be equal to the sum
of the squares on the other two
sides.”

Here Pythagoras and Euclid
(once the deadliest bores in the
classroom) come into their own,
as scientists wrestling with
problems for the first time.

Even more important, here
is a picture of how science has
grown from the observations of
ordinary men and women, not
just looking at nature around
them, but looking for things
that will help to solve the
problems of their daily lives.

The book, which brings the
story up to the present age of
power and precision, owes al-
most as much to the vivid illus-
trations of Charles Keeping
and Kenneth Symonds, and the
maps of Marjory Saynor, as to
Professor Hogben’s brilliant

_gift of simplication.

Tf you don’t get this book
for your children—ask them to
get it for you. :

; SHEILA LYND

though the group handled it
smoothly enough.
* Ps *

Three fruitless adjudications
finally constrained Vancouver
Sun critic, Stanley Bligh, to
question Miss Stirling’s method
on Friday. The prompt result
was a lengthier adjudication on
Friday night and an apology
to the previous night’s group,
but no actual improvement.

“To simply state that ‘they
did not get it over’...is not
enough,” wrote Bligh. “An
adjudicator should be able to
analyze ~the play from every
angle, reveal its characteristics
and demonstrate to the players
‘and audience, the expert’s con-
ception of the work.”

The adjudicator again re-
vealed her inability of connected
analysis in her final adjudica-
tion, Juno And The Paycock,
staged by the New Westminster
Vagabonds.

Blessed with wry Irish humor,
it depicts a working class family
in a Dublin tenement immedi-
ately after the founding of the
Trish Free State in 1922. The
social lessons are . implicit,
chiefly in the failings of the
leading characters, while its
terrible tragedy is nonetheless
imbued with a vitality of life
and promise.

Verlie Cooter as Juno was
superb. To her also goes the
credit for pulling the action
together again, after a serious
loosening in the first scene of
the last act. Aside from this, and
an inadequate dramatic cres-
céndo in the earlier acts, this

.Was the one play which created

an atmosphere of real life and
real people. :

» Mildred Franklin (Mrs. Madi-
gan) turned in a_ particularly
brilliant minor characterization,
while the principals gave earthy
and sustained portrayals. Harley
MacKibbin (as the crippled gon)
misinterpreted his part, weaken- —
ing his denouncement and the
overall climax.

With its vigorous honesty,
mature characterization and
expert contrasts of mood, Juno
And The Paycock deserved to
win the Festival, despite Ian
Thorne’s superior direction of
Kingsley’s constricted play.

N. E. STORY

‘HUB HUMOR

ep

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