Audio Drama Modernism

The Missing Link between Descriptive Phonograph Sketches and Microphone Plays on the Radio

Tim Crook

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9789811582400
• eBook ISBN: 9789811582417
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Music
• Index: Social Sciences

Audio Drama and Modernism traces the development of political and modernist sound drama during the first 40 years of the 20th Century. It demonstrates how pioneers in the phonograph age made significant, innovative contributions to sound fiction before, during, and after the Great War. In stunning detail, Tim Crook examines prominent British modernist radio writers and auteurs, revealing how they negotiated their agitational contemporaneity against the forces of Institutional containment and dramatic censorship. The book tells the story of key figures such as Russell Hunting, who after being jailed for making 'sound pornography' in the USA, travelled to Britain to pioneer sound comedy and montage in the pre-Radio age; Reginald Berkeley who wrote the first full-length anti-war play for the BBC in 1925; and D.G. Bridson, Olive Shapley and Joan Littlewood who all struggled to give a Marxist voice to the working classes on British radio.

© The Author(s) 2020

T. CrookAudio Drama ModernismPalgrave Studies in Soundhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8241-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Tim Crook¹

(1)

Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK

End Abstract

Radio drama emerged during the early part of the twentieth century as a new dimension of the storytelling medium and a key part of the first broadcasting format. In more recent years, there has been a rich and powerful extension of radio drama art into audio fiction in podcasting. This book is an investigative history. It tells the story of a twenty-year research journey into radio drama’s origins primarily in the United Kingdom and asks new questions of key radio drama events in the 1920s and 1930s. Hopefully, it identifies the significance and contribution of political dramatists in progressing radio and sound drama as an art form and the important contribution of its innovation to the cultural phenomenon of modernism.

A fair number of shibboleths have been put to rest. Sound drama did not begin at the BBC or indeed via radio transmission of speech by anyone else. For a good twenty to thirty years between the Victorian and Edwardian eras, this book discovers and celebrates the brilliant and creative sound storytellers who used a long-lost mechanical technology of metallic horns, needles and wax cylinders to produce the first audio dramas. This was the phonograph age. There was no electricity or digital software to fashion special effects and conjure imaginative worlds in audio-visual multi-track design formats. There were no clever microphones with multiplicity of arrangements to capture spatial and sensitive options in fields of recording and immersive sonic experience. The understanding of sound was naturally based and the technology and technique far more cognitive of what was capable of being heard at the very moment of utterance and physical generation. Illusion was a matter of understanding the physical and imaginative potential of the space being used for the performance. The sound shamans of live theatre had traditions and secrets to be respected and followed.

There is an exposition through the early chapters that unfolds and provides the evidence of innovation and dramatic intensity enchanting the human heart, mind and everyday being with comedy, politics, pathos and bathos. There are genius writers, producers and performers such as Russell Hunting who in the space of only a few years was a theatrical Mephistopheles in red tights, a jailbird doing time for making sound pornography instead of phonography, and originating best-selling montage that captured the patriotic and imperialist zeitgeist of the British people getting used to parting, longing and returning of soldiers and civil servants dominating the world in trade, military and cultural power through Royal Naval troopship. The Departure and Return of Troopships phonograph montage would be an after-dinner favourite of King George V who was also a subjugating Emperor of India. Hunting’s dramatization of the Battle of the Marne in 1914 aspired to modernist and realistic sound drama that the film industry struggled to achieve twenty years later.

The Great War of 1914–1918 created a thriving and lucrative market for short audio drama representations of the conflict at home, on the sea, at the Western Front and in the air. Major Alfred Edward Rees, who had been a building surveyor for the London County Council in civilian life, accelerated his achievement in the audio fiction art form from recording drill commands when a Captain in 1915 to scripting, directing and producing the earliest surviving evidence of a sound drama series in 1917. ‘On Active Service’ comprises around 21 minutes of drama and six separate episodes in the lives of soldiers Tippy and Ginger—two friends who go to the war, survive the horrors of trench fighting and return home as heroes. There is, of course, a sanitizing fantasy of everyone living happily ever after and the suggestion that the courage displayed and horror experienced were so much fun. However, this remarkable series of phonograph records produced for the Columbia label is proto-radio drama serial. In its totality it has a duration that covers the early development of the microphone play at the BBC, which usually ran from 15 minutes to half an hour and then longer sequences during the middle to late 1920s.

There is no evidence that Major Rees joined the BBC to transfer his phonograph entertainment and writing skills to the electro-magnetic medium. The First World War practice of producing ‘descriptive sketches’ for listeners at home with phonograph playing machines is the clearest evidence of the missing link in audio drama’s history. The storytelling content was as rich and varied as the spectrum of human communication. Exciting action narratives and evocative mysteries were contained in the podcasts of their time on three- to four-minute flat shellac discs: the ghosts of angels said to have been God’s phantom reserves that saved the British Expeditionary Force in the retreat from Mons in 1914; satirical comedic mocking of the Kaiser flying over to England in a Zeppelin, and something solemn and poignant—a military funeral on the Western Front titled ‘The Last Post’ and credited to a producer called Arthur Lees who has also been lost to history.

This historical investigation interrogates the relationship between phonograph speech and drama and radio speech and drama to find out whether there has been symbiosis and inspiration from one to the other. There was certainly an overlapping of ambition and innovation in form. Columbia Records would produce ambitious sound ballad productions of the ‘Death of Nelson’ and ‘To Meet the King’ in 1930 featuring the most famous acting couple of the time, Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson, and who dominated the star-billing of live BBC radio productions. Casson had also been a regular guest producer of radio plays at the BBC from 1924.

Columbia produced ‘The Trumpeter’ in 1929—an early and pioneering example of what would be recognized at the BBC as the British radio feature—which advanced an explicit anti-war message of pacifism in drama, poetry, singing ballad and musical orchestration. Most of the phonograph sound curated for this project has been made available via online links set out in the bibliography. Where copyright issues prevent this, I have explained how it is possible to listen to the works cited.

British radio drama developed exponentially between the two world wars and this book argues that the issues of technique, artistic potential and the ‘how to’ of innovation and achieving quality through production as well as maximizing listening audience potential were catalysed through the publication of two modernist manifestos : Gordon Lea’s Radio Drama and How to Write It (1926) and Lance Sieveking’s The Stuff of Radio (1934). Both were insiders—producing creative drama and what would later be recognized as ‘features’ in the BBC. The challenge was to identify what they could draw upon from existing and developing dramatic arts, namely stage theatre and film, and discover as intrinsic and special to the sound drama medium itself.

Lea had been an active drama producer at the BBC’s Newcastle radio station, call-signed ‘5NO’, and his book was forworded by the first Director of Productions J.E. Jeffrey and endorsed by BBC Managing Director, John Reith, who instructed that a copy should be distributed to every BBC office and production centre. It is probably because all of the first high-profile histories of the BBC were researched and written by men that patronymic canonization of achievement has excluded and made invisible the contribution of early women producers and writers. For many decades it was assumed, and indeed celebrated, that the first originally written drama for radio broadcast by the BBC was the comedy Danger by Richard Hughes.¹ Dr. Christina L. Pepler in her 1988 PhD thesis for Bristol University set the record straight by pointing out that Mrs Phyliss M. Twigg had inaugurated and authored ‘the first specially written wireless play, The Truth about Father Christmas’ , which was performed live in the London studio of the BBC’s London radio station 2LO at 5 p.m. on Christmas Eve 1922.² The information was ‘hidden in plain sight’ in the sense of having been published in Arthur Burrows’ The Story of Broadcasting published as early as 1924.³

No more trace of Phyliss Twigg’s Christmas play can be found either in script or sound recording form. The first script of an original and modern play produced for broadcast from a BBC studio has, however, survived. Gertrude E. Jennings’ Five Birds in a Cage was transmitted live from Savoy Hill on 29 November 1923.⁴ It was a one-act comedy with a cast of five people trapped in a London Underground lift and had a political edge in exploring class relations.

LIFTMAN:

Can’t be done, lady.

SUSAN:

Why not?

LIFTMAN:

I can’t open the gates.

SUSAN:

Oh, come, that’s ridiculous nonsense! I’ve been in the tube before, you know. I go everywhere! Leonard, explain to this man—

LEONARD:

(advancing). Look here, my man—

SUSAN:

(pushes him back). All right, all right, all right. (Slight pause) Being a duchess has never prevented me from studying human nature. I travel third class. I go in buses, even in trams. And so you see! Besides, I’m a socialist. I don’t think these distinctions should exist. I consider myself and that young person quite—(Looking at NELLY.)

LEONARD:

(moving C.). Susan!

SUSAN:

Yes, I do. Leonard. That young person and myself are quite the same—and as to you, Leonard, and that gentleman—well, the only difference between you is that he can light a lamp and you can’t. Now, in my position—⁵

Five Birds i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Audio Drama and Modernism: Gordon Lea 1926, the First Manifesto
• 3. Radio Drama and the Avant-Garde: Lance Sieveking 1934, the Second Manifesto
• 4. The Modernist Turn in Literature and Radio Studies: How It Changes Understanding of the History of Sound Drama
• 5. Bridging Political Modernism Between Descriptive Phonographs, 1920s Political BBC Radio Drama and the 1930s Agitational Radio Features
• 6. Modernist Phonograph Drama in a Belfast Street and a Montage on War: The Sonic Genius of Russell Hunting
• 7. Great War Descriptive Sketches
• 8. Angels of Mons and the Divine Service for King and Country
• 9. Are the Sound Drama Phonographs Examples of ‘Modernist’ Propaganda?
• 10. Reginald Berkeley: Pioneering Modernist Playwright and Political Radio Drama as Agitational Contemporaneity
• 11. Direct BBC Censorship of Modernist Texts by D.G. Bridson and His Negotiation with Joan Littlewood and Olive Shapley of ‘Institutional Containment’
• 12. Sound Drama as Political and Agitational Contemporaneity and Modernist Expression
• Back Matter