1969 Bulletin article on ABC radio drama

 The bulletin.Vol. 091 No. 4651 (3 May 1969)

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A good play on the wireless By SYLVIA LAWSON

IN RECENT WEEKS the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s Board has been talking aboilt next year’s spending money and how it should be spent. As they weighed the competing claims the Commission as communicator-commentator, as culture-builder, as educator, as (finally?) entertainer—it was hard to imagine much time being spent on that curious survival, the radio play. This is hardly surprising on the approximate, if rather elusive, figures available. In 1967-68 the ABC had about $43 million to spend. Of that about $112,000 was used for radio drama and features; no further break- down is available. None the less, radio plays go on being produced in the Commission’s Sydney studios at the rate of three a fortnight; one a week in Melbourne; one in eight weeks for national relay from each of the other capitals, apart from production for State consumption only. The plays produced are indubitably listened to. The social fact in the sea of rating figures is as gaily slippery as a porpoise, but it seems from both an independent commercial survey and from one recently initiated by the Com- mission’s statistics department (apply- ing only to country areas in N.S.W. and Victoria) that throughout the con- tinent about 50,000 people listen at least once a week to an evening drama broadcast that is, to National Radio Theatre on Mondays (75 or occasion- ally 90 minutes) and/or Sunday Play- bill (an hour). At lunchtime on Wednesdays, Encore draws more than 100,000 listeners, about half of them women at home. Virtually no children or teenagers listen, and when the figures are presented in terms of quarter-hour segments there seems to be a mysterious amount of tuning-in and tuning-out. Nobody writes in to say they liked a play; occasionally they’ll write to complain, particularly if taste or morals have been offended. Otherwise fan-mail to the drama . department concerns only serials. (“Blue Hills’ still draws up to a quarter of a million listeners a week, and “A House is Built,” Joy Hollyer’s adaptation of the Barnard Eldershaw novel, due to reach its 120th and last episode in May t has proved enormously popular.) On most Sunday and Monday even- ings the play on offer is a traditionally structured entertainment with a begin- ning, a middle, and an end, in that order. The well-made play, in fact. It has to be,” says director of drama James Pratt. “The listener has only his ear to follow with . . .”

But this doesn’t have to mean an unrelieved line-up of Coward, Maugham, Rattigan, and Enid Bagnold, though all four are represented in the programs for the first six months of this year. There are also John Mor- timer’s “The Wrong Side of the Park,” William Golding’s “The Spire,” Hal Porter’s “The Forger,” and “Every- man,” and “Twelfth Night.” Tom Stoppard’s Italia Prize play “Albert Bridge,” “The Duchess of Malfi,” Marcel Pagnol’s “Topaze,” and Welles’ “Moby Dick Rehearsed” are other plays on recently or about to be aired. Nobody involved sees radio drama as a poor relation of the stage, or seems to agree with Alfred Hitchcock that the wireless is now only TV with the tubes blown out.

Sydney staff producer Frank Zeppel insists that he’s simply a director of drama who likes working for the stage but hasn’t time (his last live production was of Albee’s “The Zoo Story” for the Q in 1965), and that in radio production you don’t miss a live audience. While James Pratt clearly feels that the commitment to strong characterisation precludes “experimental” plays, Zeppel says “experimentalism as a policy would obviously be undesirable, but it depends on the particular plays where are the writers? If only we knew where they were and why they, don’t write for radio. . .” Mr. Zeppel was on his way to rehearse a Sunday Playbill offering, “Chocky,” a gentle fantasy-thriller by John Wyndham adapted by BBC producer John Tydeman. While National Radio Theatre is there to provide the classics and a proportion of avant-garderie, Sunday Playbill, to use James Pratt’s description, “is no, not pure escapism; I prefer to say easy listening.”

At that rate, “Chocky” should be just what the time-slot orders: normal intelligent boy is pos- sessed by an invading extra-galactic presence which is* however, benevolent. Both parents also normal and intelli- gent, father more perceptive and understanding than mother. Dialogue casually sophisticated. Psychiatrist a goodie, scientist a baddie. Nothing about class- or income-level, but both, obviously and conveniently, upper- middle. Eight hours of run-through and rehearsing went into “Chocky.” A single lead part in a one-hour play would bring the actor (as from November 1968) a fee of $37.15; “Chocky” has no lead but three co-leads (Ruth Cracknell,’ Alistair Duncan, Edward Acting tor radio offers satisfaction, but modest financial return Howell), each of whom is paid $31.45. Supporting players”, Cast A category, get $21.75; Cast B (otherwise extras) $14.55.

The ABC pays residual fees: 50 percent for the first replay, 25 per- cent for the second and later ones. Actors Equity isn’t happy with these arrangements, and performers with experience in Britain find the ABC’s rates compare unfavorably with the BBC’s. But then none of them claims to be doing radio plays for a living.

The rehearsal situation is at once intensive and informal; Zeppel and his cast of six seemed clearly to be enjoy- ing it. Scrupulously, he called the per- formers by their fictional names: “All - of you, be careful of movement under narration . . . Dr. Thorley (to Edward Howell), not too much of the ‘Boris Karloff . . . Mary (to Ruth Cracknell), if you’d fade a little on ten, then a fraction more beat. And in the scene on pages 23 and 24, remember you’re jealous, Mary—and you’ve got a good mind; what mind any woman’s got after having a couple of kids, that is . . Ruth Cracknell, who has three chil- dren and a very good mind, didn’t object; she was too busy sizing up Mary’s attitude. After the run-through, she and Alistair Duncan were unequi- vocal about radio acting. “It’s satisfying in itself. There’s no other reason for doing it,” said Miss Cracknell with emphasis.- “For me, it’ almost my only outlet into drama. On the stage I’m typecast for satire—last year I had just one dramatic opportunity at the Inde- pendent (this was her highly praised performance in Albee’s “A Delicate Balance”) and that was all. Radio gives me a chance to do the classics, Greek tragedy, Shakespeare; I love it. “Money? Well, when I go in a three woman show at the Philllip and it runs for five or six months, I earn a fortune. I won’t tell you how much. Then when that’s over I’m very happy to spend a few months pottering along . . . ‘Play- school,’ a part in a serial like ‘I Married a Bachelor,’ this . . .”

Alistair Duncan said: “In making a living through one’s voice, one inevitably depends on voice-over work in com- mercials ... if it weren’t for that kind of work one simply wouldn’t have the time for this.” Duncan likes radio drama for the same reason he likes film acting: it calls for concentration and fine point- ing, one bit at a time. But per hour of time spent, commercials pay about three times as well. “So, for me they sub- sidise radio acting.”

Edward Howell seemed pretty uncon- cerned about money and was, like the others, unworried about the size of the unseen audience. “I believe there are far more listening than we wot of,” he said gently. After 40 years in the radio business he feels considerable regret for the days of live-broadcast acting, finished ten years ago. “With everything pre-recorded, the tension, the high pressure has gone out of it, and that means that some of the acting craft has gone, too —the pressure was good for us.” Any sound-effects man will tell you that in a good many cases his contribu- tion to radio drama is just as important as the actor’s. The FX officer (Grade One, Two, or Three according to experi- ence and years of service with the Commission) tends to be a little defen- sive about his specialisation.

They tend to be multilingual; three of the eight FX men in the Sydney Forbes Street studios cover between them French, German, Russian, Yugoslav, and Tibetan. They control a library of well over 5000 discs, standard and LP, with 5O effects on each; and apart from using the BBC’s FX service and recordings from all over Europe, America, and Japan, they devise and cut a good many of their own. So much for what radio drama does for the audience and the people on the production side. What if anything does its continued existence mean for local writers? A

 radio play is its words, as a TV play never is. “The writer puts only about 15 per- cent of the life into a TV drama,” James Pratt said. “That’s visual drama, it needs just enough dialogue to make it comprehensible but in radio drama the writing is about 80 percent of the product.” The department’s roneoed pamphlet “The Writing of Radio Plays” asks that “Australians should write simply and underivatively out of their own imaginative, emotional, or physical experience,” and notes that “The ABC has long endeavored to encourage an Australian school of playwrights . . .” For the July-September quarter the drama department plans a Theatre Round the World series of 13, to include Durrenmatt’s “Romulus the Great,” Max Frisch’s “Andorra,” Miller’s “A View from the Bridge,” and a BBC recording of Italian Nadia Ginzburg’s “The Advertisement,” with Joan Plowright in an immensely demanding lead. “. . . and for Australia we’ve chosen ‘The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll,’ said Mr. Pratt, sighing heavily. “Yes, I know; again. But I’m afraid you can’t get far beyond it. “Yes, we are interested in Australian material. Yes, we do want stuff that raises live issues, explores the society, and so on. Do scripts come in? My oath they do. For every one we accept we reject at least 20. They’re so intol- erably bad we can’t even suggest re- shaping.” Frank Zeppel said he had the feeling that too many writers around now saw the TV series as the only form offering enough in money and potential audi- ence. “The dramatist ought to remem- ber that in terms of audience one National Radio Theatre broadcast can give him as many people as six or seven weeks at the Old Tote. If you want to write plays you’ll do it, even if the fee isn’t quite what you want it to be . . . and, after all, there is some cash in it.”- But the cash, peace to both Zeppel and Pratt, isn’t much really: $312 for a completed one-hour play, with a 50 percent addition for one replay, and 25 percent for each replay, if any, there- after. An Australian Writers’ Guild spokesman was cautiously acquiescent: “Let’s say it’s basically in line with the pay for equivalent work in other media but that doesn’t mean we think it’s nearly good enough, and we hope to re-negotiate these rates soon with the ABC.” The $312 wouldn’t, perhaps, be too bad for a week’s high-pressure crea- tivity. But the playwright might be on his 30- to 40-page script character, atmosphere, plot line for a month, and he might have a family to feed. Nobody but the serial writers Gwen Meredith and Joy Hollyer seems able to rely on radio-writing for any sort of living. Of a few others spoken to, one a comparatively successful pro. who publishes “young-adult” fiction in the United States indicated a bit impatiently that local radio stuff was, of course, very small potato chips, indeed, and that the radio drama could only be the third or fourth use of good basic material, somewhere after the initial novel, the movie version with TV after-life attached, serial and con- densation rights . . . Another of the ABC’s occasional contributors didn’t want to stop to discuss her radio plays; she was too busy finishing a novel. And Patricia Hooker, who is prob- ably the single notable talent to emerge from dramatic writing for the ABC in recent years (both radio and TV), is in London. The BBC bought the radio version of her last play, “The Lotus Eaters” (originally commissioned by the Adelaide Festival), and then offered her a TV writing job. The ABC has offered her “a fee” to return. So the radio play is still with us, apparently, for the ' foreseeable future. 

The ABC supplies it less as entertain- ment (or culture) than as, in effect, a service; it is always reliably there, at the expected times, for those who happen to be wandering through. It doesn’t pay either performers or writers nearly enough, and its defenders tend here and there to betray their own case by talking about it as a training ground (for so many Morris Wests?) or as an outlet for actors otherwise frustrated. As a service, it has to be acknow- ledged as a good one. 

 This way, plays the local theatre has either forgotten or will never get around to can be heard if not seen, and a tale of Dickens’ (the Pip-Estella story out of “Great Expectations”) could be avail- able the other Monday evening, well- adapted and well-spoken and Dickens’ talk is outstandingly speak- able for many of those who wouldn’t be likely to open or reopen the book. But no form of entertainment (or culture) can be regarded as very much alive when it’s neither written for nor written about. (The only reviews of radio drama, unless I am wrong, are those in “The Age’s” Radio and TV Guide; 100-130 words of tolerant assessment, in five-point type in a bottom corner, once a week.) The last significant imaginative work written for radio in English was “Under Milk Wood,” completed a month before Dylan Thomas’ death in 1953. It’s hard to remember that only 20 years ago broadcast drama was still regarded (and cited in our high- school Engish lessons) as the great new challenge for playwrights in general, and as the promise of a bright new day for verse drama especially. But while the more portentous and religiose efforts of the ’forties are now deservedly forgotten, a few remain valid and fully producible MacNeice’s “The Dark Tower” and his shorter radio pieces, the Auden- Isherwood “The Ascent of F 6.” And “Under Milk Wood,” though set down as prose, has the intensity of poetry. 

Radio, being a use for language, is also a guardian of language as no visual medium can be; and it is sur- viving into a day when poetry, with much help from the Beatles, Dylan the Second, and their emulators, grows daily back into a public art. If “Every- ‘man,” assorted Shakespeares, the post- war verse plays named, and “The Duchess of Malfi” are playable, then so perhaps are other verse plays or prose ones which are turned into poetry by voices. The radio play, having now so little to lose (. 2 per- cent minus of that budget?), might gain now by gambling to recover some of the purely aural magic that-‘ came from dramatic speech in rhythm, dis- tant horns, bodiless sounds of revelry by night, winds from the icy nowhere, and every brand of alarum and excursion from cockcrow to count- down and blastoff. 

The Bulletin 3 May 1969