RADIO
No Substitute
DRAMA 'is no doubt a sore point at Broad-' casting House. After all, it must cost a good deal, considerable resources of equipment and manpower must be deployed, and yet the visible or audible impact on the world outside seems to be nil. I don't mean that there may not be up- wards of a milliOn aficionados tuned in to, and satisfied by, say, Saturday Night Theatre, since I'm sure no explosive impact is either expected or desired in that quarter, but that big productioni of the classics and experimental ventures. which in the theatre or on television would receive excited attention on every hand, pass like steam- ships in the night and leave no bubble behind. Now although radio has come to accept this quiet passing as the normal fate of its output in general, it isn't entirely the fault of a fickle public that radio drama in particular goes so sadly neglected; for, in the form in which it reaches us, it is almost always negligible. I'm still not disputing that there may be thousands, even scores of thousands, of satisfied customers, but would they not be equally satisfied with better-quality goods and would their numbers not be swelled by thousands of hitherto unsatis- fied and lapsed customers—and wouldn't this be nice, not just for the sake of the swelling, but for the sweet satisfaction?
Why is radio drama's output so easy to ignore? Why does no one take it seriously? The chief reason seems to be that it doesn't take itself seriously. This appears particularly in the hand- ling of classical drama, To say that nearly all the parts are played in a BBC Rep voice is to convey to anyone who has ever heard a radio play on the BBC the crux of the complaint. Since we are a blind audience, the actor's voice is virtually the only medium we have to collect those subtleties which are normally shared out among voice, gesture, facial and bodily move- ments, sheer physical presence. A tall order, granted. But whatever else the situation, may demand, it is not a relapse into stereotype. To bring evidence from recent broadcasting, it is of no help to us to hear Nestor in Troilus and Cressida portrayed as a generalised old-man type. The words, of course, the woi•ds create him on the page, but surely we are not setting aside our three hours to hear .a mere reading of Shakes- peare, even less so if it is to be obscured by the addition of a toothless accent? Addition is the rub. It is not just to miss the point of Troilus's character to deliver his lines wrapped in a seam- less romantic moan, it is a damaging accretion, because it washes out the very sense of the lines themselves and renders down a complex and sensitive character into a callow and boring adolescent. One could multiply examples from this and other productions—the most glaring recently perhaps was Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra smothered in a Loamshire accent— the point is that it is not wrong to draw an accent out of the lines, if in that way a new facet is added to the characterisation, but that it's an act of character-murder to plaster one on from outside for the purpose of jollying along the part and, by implication, the audience. The reasoning seems to be Widow Blackacre's in Wycherley's The Plain Dealer: 'Your own noise will secure your sense from censure.'
All which said, I must now commend last Tuesday night's production of The Plain Dealer for plain dealing. From the opening exchanges between Patrick Allen's Captain Manly and Aubrey Woods's Lord Plausible, there was no question we were going to find our own world well lost in William Wycherley's. Here were men who knew what they wanted to say and immediately said it, in words which may have been lying on the page since the seventeenth century, but for all we cared were being said in front of us for the first time on Tuesday night.
If there were posturings, they came from the character, not from an actor who was trying to trick one into life without understanding' him; if there were pauses before phrases they were not in imitation of spontaneous conversation, but suited the rhythm of the character's thought at that moment. The line between is a narrow one, but there is no mistaking which side of it you land when you hear it, and it's the difference between bad acting and good, between a script reading and a performance. This was a per- formance and I suspect that for that we have not only to thank Flora Robson, Jill Bennett and the rest, but the producer John Tydeman, since neither Troilus nor Antony was saved by star actors. October 22 is the next date of perfor- mance: it is no substitute for a night at the theatre, it is a night at the theatre.
HENRY TUBE
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