Shakespeare—Radio Ace

Radio Record, Volume XII, Issue 24, 25 November 1938, Page 3

Shakespeare—Radio Ace

Master Playwright Of The Air Was An Elizabethan!

SHAKESPEARE remains not only the best, but in some circles certainly the most popular of all our radio playwrights. His claim to the distinction is more apt than might at first seem. He wrote, at the Globe Theatre, for a medium which in its requirements approximated more nearly to broadcasting than to the theatre as it is understood today. Shakespeare’s theatre was a theatre of language; words painted the scene and pictured the action. . The broadcasting studio, too, is a theatre of language; though sound-effects and other mechanical devices have been exploited as embroidery to production, the radio dramatist is slowly coming to realise that the words spoken are the true stuff of the play. There lies the secret of the scarcity of really good radio playwrights even today, after more than a decade of broadcasting. " Shakespeare, like his radio suc- _

cessors, made much use of music. The power of "incidental music" to colour the play, its solvent effect upon the emotions of the audience, were perfectly understood in the theatre up to the days of George Alexander, Herbert Tree and Robert Courtneidge. (To the lastnamed, New Zealand theatre-goers owe some of their most delightful memories of pre-war Shakespearean productions of the more lavish order.) In the NBS series of Shakespearean plays, music plays a noble part; and are not the plays themselves word symphonies? Radio has brought fresh triumphs to our prince of playwrights, who has placed at our disposal an entire library of radio dramatic masterpieces ready made, The best radio dramatist of the future will be found to be the one who knows his Shakespeare as Bunyan knew his Bible and Milton knew the classics, —