Tom Stoppard: Radio Plays. 2012. GB. CD. 332 minutes (5 disc set). British Library. ISBN: 978-0712351232. Price: £40.00
About the Author: Peter M. Lewis is Senior Lecturer in Community Media at London Metropolitan University. Selected publications include: Lewis, P.M. & Jones, S.(2006) (eds) From the Margins to the Cutting Edge - Community Media and Empowerment (Catskill, NJ: Hampton Press); Lewis, P. M. (ed) (1993) Alternative Media: Linking Global and Local, (UNESCO Reports and Papers in Mass Communication No.107, Paris); Lewis, P. M. & Booth, J (1989) The Invisible Medium: Public, Commercial and Community Radio (London: Macmillan); Lewis, Peter M. & Pearlman, C (1986) Media and Power: From Marconi to Murdoch (London: Camden Press); Lewis, P. M. (1978) Community Television and Cable in Britain (London: British Film Institute).
Over the last fifteen years the growth in radio studies has been accompanied by an increasing number of books on a subject previously invisible in academia. In most, at least one reference can be found to Stoppard whose radio plays effectively launched his writing career and are among the brightest jewels in the radio drama canon. Yet who has actually heard them? They are likely to be only a 'trace memory' among older listeners, to use Scannell and Cardiff’s phrase bemoaning the lack of recordings from even earlier days. Now at last, thanks to the collaborative effort of the BBC and the British Library, we can hear the work of a writer 'whose work, artistically, politically and philosophically, has reflected the world in words over the past five decades better than any other' (Gillian Reynolds, Daily Telegraph, 2 July 2012).
This box set includes Albert’s Bridge (1967), Artist Descending A Staircase (1972), The Dog It Was That Died (1982) and In The Native State (1991). I tried listening to these classics in the classic mode advised by the Radio Times (in the days long before Stoppard) when radio was the newcomer in the sitting room - in an armchair in the dark to allow one’s imagination to run with the sounds of the play. I soon had to turn on the light to pause the CD and check two scripts in Methuen’s Best Radio Plays so as to enjoy re-reading and replaying Stoppard’s verbal tricks and wit. After that I tried to listen with the ears of my students. 'It would seem a meaningless noise because … people have been taught to expect certain kinds of insight but not others' – the words of Beauchamp (Rolph Lefebvre) in Artist Descending A Staircase, defending his recordings to his dismissive flatmate, the painter Donner (Carleton Hobbs). 'The first duty of an artist is to capture the radio station' he goes on, but I fear the old-fashioned delivery and accents of the two actors would fail to capture my students who would then miss the extraordinary ingenuity of the play’s palindromic form. I too found myself resistant to the acting style: this fascinating play cries out for a new production.
The other three plays easily passed my ‘student test’, each having contemporary resonance
The other three plays easily passed my ‘student test’, each having contemporary resonance. In Albert’s Bridge, broadcast the same summer that Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead first played at the Old Vic, Albert has just completed a degree in philosophy but there are no jobs for graduates, let alone philosophers. The job he ends up in bears some resemblance to a philosophical conundrum: an endless cycle of painting a bridge so long that by the time the task is completed, repainting has to start again. The Dog It Was That Died , broadcast a few years after the BBC’s first adaptation of Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor and the publication of Philby’s autobiography, is a witty commentary on the absurd contradictions of counter-espionage, still relevant today. In The Native State is an example of the kind of evidence provided by radio that ought more often to cross subject boundaries into other fields of study. An engrossing plot, great performances by Felicity Kendal and Peggy Ashcroft, richly layered with the kind of hindsight interpretation that Stoppard so well develops, is at once a critique of British imperialism and the collaboration of an Anglo-Indian elite, a subtle exploration of linguistic and cultural codes and, as in Artist Descending A Staircase, an interrogation of memory, both personal and historical.
'If I had one good man high up in the BBC' (Beauchamp again) 'it would become art for millions.' Fortunately for us all, Stoppard had two good men in the BBC Radio Drama Department, Richard Imison and John Tydeman. Their encouragement and patronage have handed down some treasures for public and scholarly consumption. I hope this BBC/BL project reaches, if not millions, a very wide listenership, and that more recordings, from the authors and producers of the many more jewels in the archives, will be made available.
Peter M. Lewis