Playwright Ron Hutchinson sets his tribute to the birth of British radio drama in an odd sort of 1924. This is a time when someone can complain about the profusion of Agatha Christie novels, even though the crime writer has only three books to her name. It is an era when the London stage presents experimental dramas with titles such as Gloom and Doom three decades before Waiting for Godot. And it has characters whose vocabulary stretches to such modernisms as ‘twentysomething’ and ‘midlife crisis’.
Sorry for the pedantry, but the anachronisms are symptomatic of a play that makes it hard to know what to believe.
The bare bones are true: Richard Hughes did write the UK’s first radio play and it was called A Comedy of Danger. True, too, that the Welsh mining drama was produced by Nigel Playfair, brought in from the Lyric Hammersmith, where he did indeed stage the occasional avant-garde work.
But Hutchinson’s play, adapted and extended from his BBC Radio 4 drama, falls too easily into cliche. The crusty establishment figures running the BBC are small-minded reactionaries trying to stop the play going ahead. The playwright is a flighty rebel who submits a script regarded as a “disaster” yet somehow isn’t. The live broadcast is a seat-of-the-pants improvisation done without rehearsal or even a complete script, with a cleaner doubling as the foley artist.
Even if shreds of this are true, the play is too fanciful to convince us anything serious is at stake (witness the producer inexplicably handcuffed to his desk). That is a shame because, as the play hints, there is something extraordinary about the birth of an art form. In 1924, the possibilities of radio drama had still to be discovered; it was logical to set A Comedy of Danger in a coal mine because the characters, just like the listening audience, would be deprived of sight. If the pictures are better on the radio, it is because someone made them so.
Directed by Caroline Wilkes, the production fields a lively ensemble who keep the audience chuckling, but playing it for laughs does the true story a disservice. Even if the birth were chaotic, it was surely not such a fluke.
At New Vic theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme, until 2 March
