Amanda Wrigley

The Spaces of Medieval Mystery Plays on British Television

Medieval mystery plays have had a rich and also distinctive life on British television. These performance texts, drawn from the Bible’s story of the universe from just before its Creation to its end on the Day of Judgment, have appealed to television practitioners not only for drama adaptations (from the 1938 presentation of the Chester Abraham and Isaac onwards) and the foundation stone for new dramatic writing (such as the BBC’s 1959 The Hill by Paul Almond) but also as the focus of documentaries on contemporary civic, social and religious traditions within communities. Charles Parker, for example, cast his own mystery play from the people of York in a 1973 episode of BBC1’s Omnibus, and the 2008 BBC1 Miracle on the Estate chronicled how a mystery play was made into a film by north Manchester residents. Indeed, because of television’s interest in the rich web of meanings arising from and surrounding mystery play performance, especially with regard to their relationship with place and community, it is not always easy to make clear-cut distinctions between program genres - in particular, between programs that may be considered to be primarily dramatic productions of part or all of a mystery play and programs that contextualize dramatic performance within the overall form of documentary. It is clear that from 1938 these dramatic productions and documentaries were routinely transmitted on or very close to significant and relevant dates in the Christian calendar, suggesting that they were perceived to contribute both value and variation to religious programming schedules. Yet this was perhaps a unique case of a dramatic genre that existed in the programming schedules largely within and in relation to a particular cultural context within society more generally, and within and in relation to, in particular, the BBC’s broadcasting commitment to observe significant dates in the Christian calendar. Furthermore, only occasionally were mystery plays produced and transmitted by television companies and networks other than the BBC: producing mystery plays was a particularly BBC pursuit. Very little scholarly attention has been paid to British television’s long series of engagements with mystery plays, which stands in contrast to the extensive scholarship about the modes and meanings of mystery plays in live performance during modern times. This essay considers the extent to which dramatic performances of mystery plays produced especially for television may have contributed to an understanding of this performance genre as a mode of expression related to religious, social, and civic traditions and community life in both medieval and modern Britain. This exploration will focus particularly on how the spaces of production (a studio, cathedral, street) and the spaces of performance constructed therein (a landscape or medieval images) evoke particular interpretative frames of reference, some of which are tied strongly to a sense of place - with places, and the communities that inhabit them, being fundamentally important dimensions of performances of mystery plays.

Space and place in Joan Kemp-Welch’s television productions of theatre plays

Joan Kemp-Welch (1906–1999), one of the first female television directors, started out as an actor on both the stage and film before becoming a theatre director and finally moving to television in 1955. She directed a variety of entertainment programmes for Associated-Rediffusion before marrying her evident skills as a television director with her rich experience of theatre work, in a number of important television plays, some from the stage and others written for the new medium. This article will examine how Kemp-Welch’s experience of theatre practice may have inscribed itself on her television productions of stage plays, focusing on the practical and aesthetic use she made of space in extant studio productions of plays set in very different locales and time periods, including Sophocles’ Electra (1962), Three Sisters (1963), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1964) and Romeo and Juliet (1976). This case study of an accomplished director of television plays will, therefore, attempt to understand the social, cultural and specifically theatrical meanings of the use of space in these productions to represent and suggest a variety of domestic, rural, urban and national places on the British small screen.

Introduction: radio modernisms: features, cultures and the BBC

This collection interrogates and stimulates deep, cross-disciplinary engagement with the various understandings and interplays of ‘radio modernisms’ from the early decades of the twentieth century through to the 1950s.

Afterlives of BBC Radio Features

BBC Radio feature programmes written by established literary figures in the mid-twentieth century enjoyed richly creative afterlives across many decades and in a variety of media—for example, in print, as commercial recordings, in theatre performance and on television—as well as in a succession of new productions on radio. This activity kept works alive in the public imagination beyond the ephemeral moment of first broadcast and, it is argued, contributed to the sense (for audiences past and scholars present) of an informal canon of literary radio features. This essay explores the intermedial afterlives of three such literary features—Sackville-West’s The Rescue (1943), MacNeice’s The Dark Tower (1946) and Thomas’ Under Milk Wood (1954)—in order to demonstrate the significance of the form as a site for exploration of social issues, politics and cultural life. The essay concludes with a call for more wide-ranging attention to the protean feature form, including work that may not have persisted in the schedules, or had rich, intermedial afterlives, but that may still offer significant insights into the history of social, political and cultural life in mid-twentieth-century Britain.

Television history: archives, excavation and the future. A discussion

This article considers possible futures for television (TV) studies, imagining how the discipline might evolve more productively over the next 10 years and what practical steps are necessary to move towards those outcomes. Conducted as a round-table discussion between leading figures in television history and archives, the debate focuses on the critical issue of archives, considering and responding to questions of access/inaccessibility, texts/contexts, commercial/symbolic value, impact and relevance. These questions reflect recurrent concerns when selecting case studies for historical TV research projects: how difficult is it to access the material (when it survives)? What obstacles might be faced (copyright, costs, etc.) when disseminating findings to a wider public? The relationship between the roles of ‘researcher’ and ‘archivist’ appears closer and more mutually supportive in TV studies than in other academic disciplines, with many people in practice straddling the traditional divide between the two roles, combining specialisms that serve to further scholarship and learning as well as the preservation of, and broad public engagements with, collections. The Research Excellence Framework’s imperative for academic researchers to achieve ‘impact’ in broader society encourages active and creative collaboration with those based in public organizations, such as the British Film Institute (BFI), who have a remit to reach a wider public. The discussion identifies various problems and successes experienced in collaboration between the academic, public and commercial sectors in the course of recent and ongoing research projects in TV studies.

Aristophanes at the BBC, 1940s-1960s

This essay investigates the performance life and history of Aristophanes’ plays on BBC Radio in the 1940s and 1950s, alongside a BBC Television production of Lysistrata in the 1960s, paying attention to both their production contexts and the way audiences engaged with them. It not only explores the various approaches that have been taken in response to the challenge of rendering a highly visual comic form - Aristophanic drama - in purely aural and imaginative terms for production on the notoriously ‘blind’ medium of radio, but also charts how works from the unfamiliar and sometimes obscure genre of ancient comedy were made intelligible and understandable for the mass, non-specialist audience. The symbiotic relationship drawn out between these mass media productions of Aristophanes’ plays and the spheres of education, publishing and the stage highlights important points of creative engagement between classicists and writers on the one hand, and creative professionals in radio and television on the other, focusing especially on the contributions of Gilbert Murray, Louis MacNeice and Patric Dickinson.

Aeschylus’ Agamemnon on BBC radio, 1946-1976

This article, the first academic discussion of Greek tragedy on BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) Radio, offers a historical outline of the production of Aeschylus’Oresteia plays from the inaugural Greek tragedy on the Third crogramme in 1946 to a landmark experimental production on Radio 3 thirty years later. This case-study demonstrates the importance of the radio medium in the reception history of Greek tragedy in twentieth-century Britain, and attempts to open up the discussion of the social and cultural impact of these productions. The radio medium, in permeating cultural, economic, and geographical boundaries, undoubtedly brought knowledge and experience of Greek tragedy in performance to an audience which was at once massive and diverse, and situated beyond the theatrical and educational spheres usually occupied by Greek tragedy. Attention of focused on the collaborative relationship between radio producers (such as Val Gielgud, Raymond Raikes, and John Theocharis) and translators and writers (such as Louis MacNeice, Philip Vellacott and Gabriel Josipovici), which secured a steady flow of new scripts for production, introductory talks for broadcast, and explanatory articles for publication in theRadio Times. The process also, importantly, encouraged the emerging function of the producer as textual editor for the medium, manipulating the script for realization in the visualizing imagination of the listener.