Listening Ears, Plus Watching Eyes

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 554, 3 February 1950, Page 10

Listening Ears, Plus Watching Eyes

Comment by our Radio Review contributors — this week is confined to the first broadcasts in the new BBC . "World Theatre’ series,

Tragedy of — Coriolanus, broadcast in the World Theatre series from 3YA in the opening week, I found that my copy of the play opened at .any page a great deal more ,easily than it had done before: except when I forced myself to shut my eyes for experimental reasons, I worked quite as hard reading MT one hearing of The

j-to follow cuts, transpositions, interpolations and word alterations-as I did listening. I felt, I worked’ quite hard listening, though not as hard as though I had had no copy of the play to follow at the same time. This, of course, is

} not as it should be. Broadcast drama is meant to be heard, much as a choral concert is meant to be heard, without benefit, or pedantry, of script or score. The best broadcast drama should appeal, subject to normal variations’ in taste, to a blind audience. The BBC World Theatre production of Coriolanus wouldn’t hold many listeners in a blind audience for long -there is so much intermittent noise, a sort of dramatic static, that the main theme loses continuity. : Olivier, for one, has proved that a man-one man-may safely yell, even scream at the microphone, and get so far away with it that_his hearers have his last words,ringing in their ears ever more, I am thinking particularly of the end -of his recording. of the Harfleur speech of King Henry the Fifth. One man may safely yell at the microphone; but not two men, still less twenty-two men. The microphone is allergic to loud noise, especially to multiple loud noise, of the kind that abounds-in Coriolanus. The scene that comes off best in this broadcast production is the one most full of menace, the spy scene in Act IV, in which the Roman whispers to the Volsce his quisling information. This fifthcolumn trade has a 20th Century topicality which helps the scene to its discomforting success; but glso the whisPper is the radio’s own particular voice, heard here and nowhere else in the play. The whisper, the sigh, the soft conversation, these are the radio’s own particular voices; so the women at their gossip and chatter are more successful

| than the patricians at their loud argument with the citizens, "the beast with many heads." Moreover, the Joud voice quickly loses its identity with change of pitch or tonethree leading playets with vibrant actors’ voices become confused for the listener in spite of the helpful interpolation of terms of address such as "Citizens, hence!" where otherwise a

| rm ner nn re nen bookless listener might ‘suppose that Cominius bade noble Marcius be gone. For a blind audience, such as a radio producer should have in mind, all the signposts are needed; and the producer’s or cOmmentator’s yoice must take the placé of the written stage directions or the observed movements on the stage in a theatre performance or on the television screen. Sir Lewis Casson gives us these signposts and these stage directions in a voice too flat and weary to convince any but Third-Programme listeners that perseverance to the next act might be worth while. These remarks all fall into the debit column; yet I listened to the play with unflagging interest-the half-hour interval for the news seemed much too long, though the magnificent effect of the opening of the second part at Act IV was probably helped by listener-impa-tience. That "opening, speech of Coriolanus is marked by one’ of the major triumphs of the production-the listener is aware throughout it of the presence, the distressed and shattered presence of his wife and mother; the smallest of sounds, a gasp, a sigh, for once lift this production into the unfamiliar air of tadio art. Perhaps it is that the women {are especially gifted; certain it is that in no case does a crowd remain when it ceases to shout: one moment the crowd is there, roaring and confusing the ear with noise; the next moment it is gone, dead, silent, leaving the general, or the tribune to bellow in meaningless solitude. This is a problem for the producer of radio drama, Well, hear Coriolanus as it goes the rounds of the stations; hear it without interruption and with the knowledge that it lasts two and a-half noisy hours; and for greater interest and better understanding provide yourself with a good clear copy of Shakespeare’s play.

J.E.

B.