ON THE AIR
LAST week's programmes contained no fewer than eleven straight plays, and of course the usual serials and documentaries. That is an impressive output, and probably no one but a monomaniac heard more than half of it. Most of those I heard left me tying up bouquets for the Drama Department. Producing a play in the broadcasting studios is no doubt child's play compared with production in the theatre, but the high standard which the radio producers keep up day after day is well up on the list of things we all take for granted.
* * * * The Relapse by Vanbrugh was one of the week's successes, and this was to a great extent due to Mr. Denys Blakelock whose Lord Foppington was 'done with a nicely controlled flourish. It had that moderated emphasis which brings to caricature the sharpness of realism. On the narrow sound-track of radio the actual writing in a play comes under closer scrutiny than it does when the attention is dispersed by the stir of the stage. So, like the broadcast of The Provoked Wife some weeks ago, this performance of The Relapse showed what a consummate master Vanbrugh was of what Dryden called the "other hatinony " of prose. * * * *
I had often wondered what happened at those "Wednesday Matinees" which begin at four o'clock and knock off at five. Last week I had a chance to find out. For half an hour hardly anything happened at all. There was a play from the French called Out of the Dark in which a British officer working with the IVIaquis spent twenty-five minutes persuading a suspicious Frenchman to guide him through a forest. This was extremely well acted and produced. ,Suspense was slowly,,and carefully built up. One became convinced that soon something was going to happen, and so it did—the play stopped. The remainder of this matinee time was given over to a different kind of thing altogether. I Lived in Leftover Square was a parody of the Cavalcade type of history. It was all worked out in a bright and lively manner, but an idea as good as this is worth more work on the script and more time on the air.
* * * •* Production Report-14 was on "Furniture." The Radio Times tells me it was written and produced by Marjorie Banks, but if every work in it was written by anybody at all, then the production was the slickest of my listening week. Certainly no one paid lip-service to a script. The facts were simple and the ideas ordinary enough ; there were the usual platitudes about the unwieldiness of controls and the lack of public taste in the matter of furniture, but right from the opening parody of Twenty Questions to the end there was a fine swing and drive about this programme.
* * * * Studio audiences often set ihe great radio-listening public by the ears, for there are few things more irritating than to listen to other people roaring with laughter at some jokes which you yourself can't possibly see. A clown who pulls a funny face in front of the micro- phone is guilty of a breach of radio manners, and the funnier the face the bigger the breach. The Can You Beat It? feature on the Light Programme lays itself open to this criticism. On the other hand the False Witness series puts the studio audience in its proper place, almost as far out of mind as it is out of sight. They have no more clue than the rest of us. * * * * Dangerous Drugs, a study in addiction written by Kenneth Alex- ander and produced by Nesta Pain, kept me interested for about seventy minutes out of its seventy-five, interested but not moved, because it was a tragedy whose depths had not been sounded. * * * * I cannot recall having heard The Importance of Being Earnest on the air before, but Monday's broadcast was the most outstanding piece of minute-by-minute radio enjoyment that I have ever experi- enced. Algy needed a little time to settle down, it is true, but this is a play which takes off under its own power. And certain plays which date on the stage have a new life on the air. * * * *
The prolonged applause at the end of an act of Le Nozze di Figaro had just faded into a twelve-minute interval. A reader filled in the interval with a descriptive passage from The Woodlanders. From seven to ten-forty it was Mozart all the way. What was Hardy doing in this galley? It is a pretty enough formula to have readings from one author throughout the week, but on a special occasion like this how much better to have a few of Mozart's letters—that one, for example, in which the little boy noted that a canary in Rome sang a quarter (or was it an eighth?) of a tone higher than the one at home. HUNTER Dritoc.
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