Madeleine MacMurraugh-Kavanagh

Who Framed Theatre? The ‘Moment of Change’ in British TV Drama

It has long been the received wisdom that television drama has become increasingly ‘filmic’ in orientation, moving away from the ‘theatrical’ as its point of aesthetic reference. This development, which is associated with the rejection of the studio in favour of location shooting – made possible by the increased use of new technology in the 1960s – and with the adoption of cinematic as opposed to theatrical genres, is generally regarded as a sign that the medium has come into its own. By examining a key ‘moment of change’ in the history of television drama, the BBC ‘Wednesday Play’ series of 1964 to 1970, this article asks what was lost in the movement out of the studio and into the streets, and questions the notion that the transition from ‘theatre’ to ‘film’, in the wake of Ken Loach and Tony Garnetts experiments in all-film production, was without tension or contradiction. The discussion explores issues of dramatic space as well as of socio-cultural context, expectation, and audience, and incorporates detailed analyses of Nell Dunns Up the Junction (1965) and David Mercers Lets Murder Vivaldi (1968). Madeleine MacMurraugh-Kavanagh is the Post-Doctoral Research Fellow on the HEFCE-funded project, ‘The BBC Wednesday Plays and Post-War British Drama’, now in its third year at the University of Reading. Her publications include Peter Shaffer: Theatre and Drama (Macmillan, 1998), and papers in Screen, The British Journal of Canadian Studies, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television , and Media, Culture, and Society . Stephen Lacey is a lecturer in Film and Drama at the University of Reading, where he is co-director of the ‘BBC Wednesday Plays’ project. His publications include British Realist Theatre: the New Wave and its Contexts (Routledge, 1995) and articles in New Theatre Quarterly and Studies in Theatre Production .

Too Secret for Words: Coded Dissent in Female-authored Wednesday Plays

The Wednesday Play anthology series, transmitted on BBC1 between October 1964 and October 1970, can be defined as a landmark in British television drama: it can also, however, be defined as a male-dominated bastion of cultural elitism in which the dominant values of androcentric institutions such as the BBC were imposed upon gendered viewing formations. The following discussion continues the work of feminist culturalist television criticism in its intersection with resistance theory and response analysis by exploring the relationship between this single-play series and its specifically female audience; in particular issues such as representations of ‘woman’ and of male-female relationships in the strand will be examined, as will the mediation and interpretation of these dominant images by audiences. In reference to the writers of the plays, the discourse inscribed within male-authored texts will be counterpointed with the challenges to them in the few female-authored plays, and dialogues of dissent and resistance will be explored. The ideological issue of the positioning of the female audience as either passive receiver or active constructor of textual meaning is central to this discussion.