Theatre review: Emlyn Williams ‘The Wind of Heaven’

Theatre review: Emlyn Williams ‘The Wind of Heaven’

Theatre, Wind of Heaven, medieval saints, saint, saints, hagiography, saints in drama, drama, children, children as portents of the divine, divine, divinity, Genesian players, Sydney, The Marvellous History of Saint Bernard, Barry Jackson, Henri Gheon, fifteenth century, manuscript, The Green Pastures, play, Marc Connelly, angel, Gabriel, Adam, Eve, Adam and Eve, Bernard Shaw ‘Saint Joan’, good versus evil, Minerva Theatre, Jerome K. Jerome, ‘The Passing of the Third Floor Back’ play, jester, pilgrims, pilgrim

A.T. critiques three plays that have an angel or saint in them. Set in a Welsh village, ‘The Wind of Heaven’ is about a boy named Gwyn who works a miracle in a village devastated by cholera. He brings back to life a dead soldier and new hope to the soldier’s widow and the whole town. Jerome K. Jerome’s play about a mysterious Stranger is ‘the saint over-done’. The final play, ‘The Marvellous History of Saint Bernard’, divides its stage into heaven, earth and hell. This picture ‘was as real to the medieval mind as the Harbour Bridge is to us’. The author notes that it is illegal to depict the Deity on stage in England so Mary was substituted for God in the latter play. A.T. remarks that Bernard Shaw deployed similar techniques in his play ‘Saint Joan’.

A.T.

Sydney Morning Herald

Sydney Morning Herald

26 April 1947

Public Domain
Trove

Newspaper Review

English

Newspaper article/review;
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