Radio drama
Radio drama is a dramatised, purely acoustic performance. With no visual component, radio drama depends on dialogue, music and sound effects to help the listener imagine the characters and story: "It is auditory in the physical dimension but equally powerful as a visual force in the psychological dimension." Radio drama includes plays specifically written for radio, docudrama, dramatised works of fiction, as well as plays originally written for the theatre, including musical theatre, and opera.
Radio drama achieved widespread popularity within a decade of its initial development in the 1920s. By the 1940s, it was a leading international popular entertainment format. With the advent of television in the 1950s, radio drama began losing its audience. However, it remains popular in much of the world.
Recordings of OTR survive today in the audio archives of collectors, libraries and museums, as well as several online sites such as the Internet Archive.
By the 21st century, radio drama had a minimal presence on terrestrial radio in the United States, with much American radio drama being restricted to rebroadcasts of programmes from previous decades. However, other nations still have thriving traditions of radio drama. In the United Kingdom, for example, the BBC produces and broadcasts hundreds of new radio plays each year on Radio 3, Radio 4, and Radio 4 Extra. Like the US, Australia's network the ABC has abandoned broadcasting drama but in New Zealand on RNZ, continues to promote and broadcast a variety of drama over its airwaves.
Thanks to advances in digital recording and Internet distribution, radio drama experienced a revival around 2010. Podcasting offered the means of inexpensively creating new radio dramas, in addition to the distribution of vintage programs.
The terms audio drama or audio theatre are sometimes used synonymously with radio drama; however, audio drama or audio theatre may not necessarily be intended specifically for broadcast on radio. Audio drama can also be found on CDs, cassette tapes, podcasts, webcasts, or other digital downloads as well as broadcast radio.
History
The Roman playwright Seneca has claim as a forerunner of radio drama because "his plays were performed by readers as sound plays, not by actors as stage plays... In this respect Seneca had no significant successors until 20th-century technology made possible the widespread dissemination of sound plays."1880–1930: early years
Radio drama traces its roots back to the 1880s: "In 1881 French engineer Clement Ader had filed a patent for 'improvements of Telephone Equipment in Theatres. English-language radio drama seems to have started in the United States. A Rural Line on Education, a brief sketch specifically written for radio, aired on Pittsburgh's KDKA in 1921, according to historian Bill Jaker. Newspaper accounts of the era report on a number of other drama experiments by America's commercial radio stations: KYW broadcast a season of complete operas from Chicago starting in November 1921. In February 1922, entire Broadway musical comedies with the original casts aired from WJZ's Newark studios. Actors Grace George and Herbert Hayes performed an entire play from a San Francisco station in the summer of 1922.An important turning point in radio drama came when Schenectady, New York's WGY, after a successful tryout on 3 August 1922, began weekly studio broadcasts of full-length stage plays in September 1922, using music, sound effects and a regular troupe of actors, The WGY Players. Aware of this series, the director of Cincinnati's WLW began regularly broadcasting one-acts in November. The success of these projects led to imitators at other stations. By early 1923, original dramatic pieces written specially for radio were airing on stations in Cincinnati, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. That same year, WLW and WGY sponsored scripting contests, inviting listeners to create original plays to be performed by those stations' dramatic troupes.
Listings in The New York Times and other sources for May 1923 reveal at least 20 dramatic offerings were scheduled, either as in-studio productions or by remote broadcast from local theatres and opera houses. An early British drama broadcast was of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream on 2LO on 25 July 1923.
Serious study of American radio drama of the 1920s and early 1930s is, at best, very limited. Unsung pioneers of the art include: WLW's Fred Smith; Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll ; The Eveready Hour creative team ; the various acting troupes at stations like WLW, WGY, KGO and a number of others, frequently run by women like Helen Schuster Martin and Wilda Wilson Church; early network continuity writers like Henry Fisk Carlton, William Ford Manley and Don Clark; producers and directors like Clarence Menser and Gerald Stopp; and a long list of others who were credited at the time with any number of innovations but who are largely forgotten or undiscussed today. Elizabeth McLeod's 2005 book on Gosden and Correll's early work is a major exception, as is Richard J. Hand's 2006 study of horror radio, which examines some programs from the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Another notable early radio drama, one of the first specially written for the medium in the UK, was A Comedy of Danger by Richard Hughes, broadcast by the BBC on 15 January 1924, about a group of people trapped in a Welsh coal mine. One of the earliest and most influential French radio plays was the prize-winning Marémoto, by Gabriel Germinet and Pierre Cusy, which presents a realistic account of a sinking ship before revealing that the characters are actually actors rehearsing for a broadcast. Translated and broadcast in Germany and England by 1925, the play was originally scheduled by Radio-Paris to air on 23 October 1924, but was instead banned from French radio until 1937 because the government feared that the dramatic SOS messages would be mistaken for genuine distress signals.
In 1951, American writer and producer Arch Oboler suggested that Wyllis Cooper's Lights Out was the first true radio drama to make use of the unique qualities of radio:
Though the series is often remembered solely for its gruesome stories and sound effects, Cooper's scripts for Lights Out were later recognised as well written and offered innovations seldom heard in early radio dramas, including multiple first-person narrators, stream of consciousness monologues and scripts that contrasted a duplicitous character's internal monologue and his spoken words.
The question of who was the first to write stream-of-consciousness drama for radio is a difficult one to answer. By 1930, Tyrone Guthrie had written plays for the BBC like Matrimonial News and The Flowers Are Not for You to Pick. After they were published in 1931, Guthrie's plays aired on the American networks. Around the same time, Guthrie himself also worked for the Canadian National Railway radio network, producing plays written by Merrill Denison that used similar techniques. A 1940 article in Variety credited a 1932 NBC play, Drink Deep by Don Johnson, as the first stream-of-consciousness play written for American radio. The climax of Lawrence Holcomb's 1931 NBC play Skyscraper also uses a variation of the technique.
There were probably earlier examples of stream-of-consciousness drama on the radio. For example, in December 1924, actor Paul Robeson, then appearing in a revival of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, performed a scene from the play over New York's WGBS to critical acclaim. Some of the many storytellers and monologuists on early 1920s American radio might be able to claim even earlier dates.
1930–1960s: widespread popularity
Perhaps America's most famous radio drama broadcast is Orson Welles' The War of the Worlds, which inspired stories of a mass panic that, though greatly exaggerated, signaled the power of the form.By the late 1930s, radio drama was widely popular in the United States. There were dozens of programs in many different genres, from mysteries and thrillers, to soap operas and comedies. Among American playwrights, screenwriters and novelists who got their start in radio drama are Rod Serling and Irwin Shaw.
In Britain, however, during the 1930s BBC programming, tended to be more high brow, including the works of Shakespeare, Classical Greek drama, as well as the works of major modern playwrights, such as Chekhov, Ibsen, Strindberg, and so forth. Novels and short stories were also frequently dramatised. In addition the plays of contemporary writers and original plays were produced, with, for example, a broadcast of T. S. Eliot's famous verse play Murder in the Cathedral in 1936. By 1930, the BBC was producing "twice as many plays as London's West End" and were producing over 400 plays a year by the mid-1940s.
Producers of radio drama soon became aware that adapting stage plays for radio did not always work, and that there was a need for plays specifically written for radio, which recognised its potential as a distinct and different medium from the theatre. George Bernard Shaw's plays, for example, were seen as readily adaptable. However, in a lead article in the BBC literary journal The Listener, of 14 August 1929, which discussed the broadcasting of 12 great plays, it was suggested that while the theatrical literature of the past should not be neglected the future lay mainly with plays written specifically for the microphone.
In 1939–40, the BBC founded its own Drama Repertory Company which made a stock of actors readily available. After the war, the number was around 50. They performed in the great number of plays broadcast in the heyday of BBC radio drama of the 40s–60s.
Initially the BBC resisted American-style 'soap opera', but eventually highly popular serials, like Dick Barton, Special Agent, Mrs Dale's Diary and The Archers, were produced. The Archers is still running and is the world's longest-running soap opera with a total of over 18,400 episodes. There had been some earlier serialised drama including, the six episode The Shadow of the Swastika, Dorothy L. Sayers's The Man Born To Be King, in twelve episodes, and Front Line Family, which was broadcast to America as part of the effort to encourage the US to enter the war. The show's storylines depicted the trials and tribulations of a British family, the Robinsons, living through the war. This featured plots about rationing, family members missing in action and the Blitz. After the war in 1946 it was moved to the BBC Light Programme.
The BBC continued producing various kinds of drama, including docu-drama, throughout World War II; amongst the writers they employed were the novelist James Hanley and poet Louis MacNeice, who in 1941 became an employee of the BBC's. MacNeice's work for the BBC initially involved writing and producing radio programmes intended to build support for the US, and later Russia, through cultural programmes emphasising links between the countries rather than outright propaganda. By the end of the war MacNeice had written well over 60 scripts for the BBC, including Christopher Columbus, which starred Laurence Olivier, The Dark Tower, and a six-part radio adaptation of Goethe's Faust.
Following World War II the BBC reorganised its radio provision, introducing two new channels to supplement the BBC Home Service. These were the BBC Light Programme and the BBC Third Programme.
The BBC Light Programme, while principally devoted to light entertainment and music, carried a fair share of drama, both single plays and serials. In contrast, the BBC Third Programme, destined to become one of the leading cultural and intellectual forces in post-war Britain, specialised in heavier drama : long-form productions of both classical and modern/experimental dramatic works sometimes occupied the major part of its output on any given evening. The Home Service, meanwhile, continued to broadcast more "middle-brow" drama daily.
The high-water mark for BBC radio drama was the 1950s and 1960s, and during this period many major British playwrights either effectively began their careers with the BBC, or had works adapted for radio. Most of playwright Caryl Churchill's early experiences with professional drama production were as a radio playwright and, starting in 1962 with The Ants, she wrote nine productions with BBC radio drama up until 1973, when her stage work began to be recognised at the Royal Court Theatre. Joe Orton's dramatic debut in 1963 was the radio play The Ruffian on the Stair, which was broadcast on 31 August 1964.
Tom Stoppard's "first professional production was in the 15-minute Just Before Midnight programme on BBC Radio, which showcased new dramatists". John Mortimer made his radio debut as a dramatist in 1955, with his adaptation of his own novel Like Men Betrayed for the BBC Light Programme. However, he made his debut as an original playwright with The Dock Brief, starring Michael Hordern as a hapless barrister, first broadcast in 1957 on BBC Third Programme, later televised with the same cast and subsequently presented in a double bill with What Shall We Tell Caroline? at the Lyric Hammersmith in April 1958, before transferring to the Garrick Theatre. Mortimer is most famous for Rumpole of the Bailey, a British television series which starred Leo McKern as Horace Rumpole, an aging London barrister who defends any and all clients. It has been spun off into a series of short stories, novels, and radio programmes.
Giles Cooper was a pioneer in writing for radio, becoming prolific in both radio and television drama. His early successes included radio dramatisations of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, William Golding's Lord of the Flies, and John Wyndham's classic science fiction novel The Day of the Triffids. He was also successful in the theatre. The first of his radio plays to make his reputation was Mathry Beacon, about a small detachment of men and women still guarding a Top Secret "missile deflector" somewhere in Wales, years after the war has ended. Bill Naughton's radio play Alfie Elkins and his Little Life was first broadcast on the BBC Third Programme on 7 January 1962. In it Alfie, "ith sublime amorality... swaggers and philosophises his way through" life. The action spans about two decades, from the beginning of World War II to the late 1950s. In 1964, Bill Naughton turned it into a stage play which was put on at London's Mermaid Theatre. Later, he wrote the screenplay for a film version, Alfie, starring Michael Caine.
Other notable radio dramatists included Henry Reed, Brendan Behan, Rhys Adrian, Alan Plater; Anthony Minghella, Alan Bleasdale, and novelist Angela Carter. Novelist Susan Hill also wrote for BBC Radio, from the early 1970s. Henry Reed was especially successful with the Hilda Tablet plays. Irish playwright Brendan Behan, author of The Quare Fellow, was commissioned by the BBC to write a radio play The Big House ; prior to this he had written two plays for Irish radio: Moving Out and A Garden Party.
Among the most famous works created for radio, are Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, Samuel Beckett's All That Fall, Harold Pinter's A Slight Ache, and Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons. Beckett wrote a number of short radio plays in the 1950s and 1960s, and later for television; his radio play Embers was first broadcast on the BBC Third Programme on 24 June 1959 and won the RAI prize at the Prix Italia awards later that year.
Robert Bolt's writing career began with scripts for Children's Hour. A Man for All Seasons was subsequently produced on television in 1957. Then in 1960, there was a highly successful stage production in London's West End and on New York's Broadway from late 1961. In addition there have been two film versions: in 1966 starring Paul Scofield and 1988 for television, starring Charlton Heston.
While Alan Ayckbourn did not write for radio many of his stage plays were subsequently adapted for radio. Other significant adaptations included, dramatised readings of poet David Jones's In Parenthesis in 1946 and The Anathemata in 1953, for the BBC Third Programme, and novelist Wyndham Lewis's The Human Age. Among contemporary novels that were dramatised were the 1964 radio adaptation of Stan Barstow's A Kind of Loving ; there had also been a 1962 film adaptation.