Author: Harry Heuser

Born and raised in Germany, educated in New York City (BA, MA, PhD), Harry Heuser is a writer, exhibition curator and lecturer.
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A Moody Christmas: There’s Life Yet in the Old Scrooge

Eighty-what? Bah, humbug! Age does not deter film, stage, and television actor Ron Moody from going on tour in yet another dramatization of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the Wales Theatre Company production of which I caught at the Aberystwyth Arts Center. In fact, Moody adapted the story as well, in collaboration with director Michael Bogdanov (whose productions of Fiddler on the Roof and Amazing Grace I have reviewed on previous occasions).

What’s more, Moody not only took on the play’s largest role but enlarged it still by taking over as Dickens’s narrator as well.  He resurrected the old miser with wit, humor, and feeling, even though his voice came across rather faintly and his lines were at times mumbled or muddled to an extent that the character’s age and grumpiness could not entire disguise or explain. When Scrooge reminds one of his ghostly guides of being “mortal” and “liable to fall,” Moody’s frame made the line utterly convincing; yet he stepped surprisingly lively after his reformation, cheerfully urging the audience to rise for a standing ovation.

The production was a busy one, meticulously recreating the story’s memorable scenes and characters with numerous set changes performed by stagehands shifting the makeshift props, activities that distracted from the endearing fairytale simplicity of the narrative and very nearly defeated the object of creating a sense of proscenium arch realism. It was all too much for poor Mrs. Fezziwig, who slipped upon entering the scene in which she was introduced to Scrooge by the Ghost of Christmas Past.

All this stagecraft brought to mind the superiority of non-visual storytelling on radio and in public readings. It is in the spoken word, aided at most by music and sound effects, that a ghost story like A Christmas Carol is most likely to thrill and enchant, as it certainly did in many of the productions heard during the 1930s and ‘40s on US radio, including this Campbell Playhouse adaptation broadcast on Christmas Eve, 1939.

There is no use trying to keep the eyes dry; their services are not required for the enjoyment of plays by radio. If tears happen to blur your vision, let them run freely.  They are testimony to the vision and insight of your mind’s eye.

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To the Moon

It has been hailed as “magnificent” and “mesmerizing.” Kevin Spacey’s performance in the Old Vic production of Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten, I mean. After seeing the Old Vic’s take on The Philadelphia Story last year, in which Spacey, the theater’s artistic director, acted less-than-Cary Grantly opposite Jennifer Ehle, I was skeptical, to say the least. The Spacey age at the Old Vic has proven a troubled one.

I have yet to experience anything “mesmerizing” at the Old Vic, where, aside from Spacey’s turn in A Moon and Philadelphia Story, I also watched Sir Ian McKellen camping it up as Widow Twankey in Aladdin, which struck me, unaccustomed to the Christmas panto tradition, as disenchanting and tawdry. A Moon is well beyond both of those trifles, without quite rising above unevenness. I am not sure, though, whether to attribute my dissatisfaction with it to the script, the production, the performances, or to a perverse streak all my own—which accounts for the mess I made of these oft-revised notes.

To begin with Spacey, whose career I’ve been following since the early 1990s, when I was introduced to him by a mutual friend, backstage at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Broadway, where the man who would be Lex Luthor appeared with whatever-happened-to-Academy-Award-winner Mercedes Ruehl in Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers. No doubt, I have been trying to discover the man in his parts ever since, which does not help matters. Spacey’s off-stage persona has irked me at times, an uneasy, calculated ease that threatens to render his acting as disingenuous as an act. Then again, selecting his roles for stage or screen, he seems most comfortable and convincing in the skin of the con, the trickster, or the sham.

In A Moon, Spacey is Jim Tyrone, a middle-aged, self-confessed “third-rate ham” who lays bare his conscience-tormenting past while under the influence, in a state where men are most likely to drop their masks. Spacey’s Jim is a queer duck, more likely to drop a glass than a hint of hidden truths: there are elements of camp in his gestures and postures, suggesting a self-indulgent act rather than honesty.

In his “reflections” on A Moon (published in the playbill), Spacey claims that the challenge of impersonating a drunk is to play him “so he doesn’t become monotonous.” Was it just that, or could playing the lush be an opportunity to go “gay all of a sudden” (to quote Grant’s character in Bringing Up Baby) and explain such release as temporary spasms?

A Moon is a play of lost schemes and the schemers who get lost in them, who struggle to redeem themselves by scrapping their act or getting it together. The central character is Josie Hogan, a farmer’s daughter whom O’Neill envisioned as “so oversize for a woman that she is almost a freak,” a dated, gender-stereotyping description Eve Best could not be expected to fit. Just as Spacey’s Jim may not know as much about loving women as he claims, being that he is more likely to adore or assault than to embrace them, Josie only puts on the act of a wanton to conceal that she is virtuous, a quality she derides as being “worse than decent.”

Despite his flaws, Josie has fallen in love with Jim; or, rather, she loves him for his vulnerability when exposing them. She might have more satisfaction forgoing the company of men altogether, considering that she is being manipulated into becoming a mantrap for Jim in order keep a roof over the pighead of her father (Colm Meaney). While not lacking in willfulness, she is the only one of Hogan’s children to remain on the farm, having assisted in the escape of her younger brother, a “New England Irish Catholic Puritan, Grade B” (played by an altogether miscast Eugene O’Hare, who seemed to have gotten into the first act on a Guy Madison scholarship).

Disregarding O’Neill’s instructions, Bob Crowley, the designer in charge at the Old Vic, places what there is of action in a surrealist set reminiscent of the Dust Bowl conceived by Dali instead of a September day in the Connecticut of the early 1920s. As a symbol of farmer Hogan’s crookedness and his lost dream of a plot, this hovel of a crazy house created in me a sense of dislocation that even the earthy performance of Irish actor Meaney could not counter. And yet, it is a set fit for a play that seems set on estrangement, that sets you up by setting out as comedy but never quite settles there.

There are shades of Ah, Wilderness!, the lightest, least controversial of O’Neil’s works, considered inoffensive enough to be frequently adapted for American radio during his lifetime; but then this Moon, considered unfit for Broadway until long after the playwright’s death in 1953, turns on you and the light-heartedness gives way to some heavy-handed, drawn-out confessionals.

The audience, like the titular satellite, is being compelled to keep circling what amounts to a rehearsal for a funeral during which fears and failings are exposed and confessed, talked about rather than dealt with, let alone resolved. Redemption has rarely felt quite this unredeeming. If the lack of resolution may be considered a triumph of modernism, the orbiting in the sphere of words strikes me as a failure in dramaturgy.

The circular and roundabout are not without their returns; but, I’d rather be spinning quietly in a chairoplane (like the one at the fun fair on London’s Leicester Square, pictured above) than sit through what amounts to a cycle of remorse and unfulfilled desires.

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Being Here: Living Reconciled to Virtuality

Well, it has been two weeks since my last entry in the broadcastellan journal. I have been on trips to England’s two largest cities, London and Birmingham (pictured, in my rather futuristic snapshot), spending time with friends, taking in culture high and low. I rarely stay away that long from this virtual nook I call home. Whenever there is living to be done, I tend to fall behind with the chronicling of same; and when I finally catch up with myself in writing, the reporting seems pointless, the moment past. Perhaps it is this inability to reconcile actuality to virtuality that convinced me to keep a journal devoted to the presumably out-of-date.

Instead of summing up the fortnight that was, I am looking ahead, announcing the pieces I am going to share in the days to come. For what remains of the year (and of my time online), I shall file a few belated reports from the theaters, virtual and otherwise.

For the most part, it has been “otherwise” rather than otherwise. After my short trip to Birmingham, where I was introduced to Patrick Hughes’s mind-teasing “Superduperspective” (on view, free of charge, at the Waterhall until 17 February 2007), I went to see the aged Ron Moody as Scrooge in a touring production of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. While in London, I took in A Moon for the Misbegotten starring Kevin Spacey (whose career I have been following ever since I was introduced to his work by a mutual friend); an irreverent adaptation of Hitchcock’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, performed by a cast of four; and the musical Daddy Cool, based on the once hugely popular songs of Frank Farian (of Milli Vanilli infamy), many of which provided a soundtrack for my childhood in Germany. I am going to devote one essay each to these diverse stage entertainments, and am likely to toss in the occasional reference to American radio dramatics, the formerly free theater for the multitude.

There isn’t much “free” theater to be had these days; and, judging from the American accents I picked up only infrequently while in the UK capital, London is rather too expensive to attract many Western travelers, particularly at this time of year, when many forgo culture for commerce in their search of bargains. Although I moved from the US to Britain quite some time ago, I still think in dollars and convert pounds into US currency to assess costs. It is a habit that made the ticket prices at London’s movie theaters seem all the more outrageous. I guess we laughed more at our folly than at the penguin antics when we found ourselves paying $25 per person to see Happy Feet. Somewhat less pricey were screenings of Casino Royale (an antemeridian matinee at London’s premier movie house, the Odeon Leicester Square) and Stranger Than Fiction, playing at a much smaller venue.

Going to the pictures has gotten pricey; and that applies not only to those in motion: the current exhibition of paintings by Velasques at the National Gallery requires the forking over of an eyepopping £12. As price tags raise expectations, the paintings seemed to lose some of their lustre when considered in the light losing itself in empty pockets. No wonder I keep turning to the comparatively cheap thrills of old-time radio drama for my day-to-day amusement.

Though no longer free, there was much on offer at home, if only I had been listening to the radio. Still to be enjoyed are Sir Ian McKellen in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and a production of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, both aired on BBC radio The BBC makes programming available online for a week, and I am now trying to catch up with some of the outstanding or noteworthy dramas presented in recent days—from the gay wedding at The Archers to the five-part adaptation of A Room to Let, a story collaboratively conceived by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Elisabeth Gaskell—broadcasts I missed while wirelessly away in England.

Mind you, I could have enjoyed wireless access at our hotel—for the price of £15 a week; but, more than the cost itself, I resented being prompted to provide personal data in order to be granted a privilege that ought to be free like the air itself. Paying for air charged with the particles of commerce? Being charged yet again for exposing myself to a deluge of online advertising while depriving myself of an opportunity to recharge? Progress? Bah, humbug!

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"We will interrupt all programs": Radio Drops a Bombshell

It certainly threw a wrench into the well-oiled works of radio as a commercial enterprise. The attack on Pearl Harbor, that is. On this day, December 7, in 1941, American broadcasters had to find ways of accommodating the “word from our sponsor” to the considerably more “important message” that would alter—or end—the lives of people the world over. Comedians Edgar Bergen and Jack Benny were both on the air as scheduled that Sunday, entertaining the multitude with their commercially sponsored programs.

Both broadcasts were prefaced by the following announcements: “Ladies and gentlemen. We will interrupt all programs to give you latest news bulletins. Stay tuned to this station.”

The bombing of Pearl Harbor and the subsequent declaration of war on Japan and its allies marked an uneasy transition of American radio as a source of advertising to one of propaganda, of information and indoctrination. As US President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared in his public radio address on 9 December 1941, “free and rapid communication” needed to be restricted in wartime.

It was “not possible to receive full and speedy and accurate reports” from all theaters of war, since even in those “days of the marvels of the radio” it was “often impossible for the Commanders of various units to report their activities by radio at all, for the very simple reason that this information would become available to the enemy and would disclose their position and their plan of defense or attack.”

Still, the medium that had long fallen into the hands of corporations, had an obligation toward the American public it ostensibly served, a duty to operate in the “public interest” that it might have neglected over the years, notwithstanding the President’s occasional and popular Fireside Chats.

Necessary delays in reporting aside, Roosevelt vowed “not hide facts from the country” if such were known and the enemy would “not be aided by their disclosure.” He reminded “all newspapers and radio stations, “all those who reach the eyes and ears of the American people,” that they had a “most grave responsibility to the nation now and for the duration of this war.”

While “sudden” the “criminal attacks” were but the “climax of a decade of international immorality,” Roosevelt argued. From Japan’s invasion of Manchukuo, Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, Hitler’s occupation of Austria and his invasion of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Russia; Italy’s attack on France and Greece, the Axis domination of the Balkans, and the Japanese attacks on Malaya and Thailand, to the bombing of Pearl Harbor—each occurring “without warning”—the events were “all of one pattern.”

America had “used” their awareness of that pattern “to great advantage. Knowing that the attack might reach us in all too short a time,” the US “immediately began greatly to increase” its “capacity to meet the demands of modern warfare.” The war, Roosevelt cautioned, would not only be “long” but “hard,” warning of shortages and a general cutting down on consumerism. He expressed himself confident that businesses and individuals alike would “cheerfully give up those material things that they are asked to give up,” and that they would “retain all those great spiritual things without which we cannot win through.”

Those who recall the attack on and fall of the World Trade Center towers might recall the sudden change in significance of a medium that could be relied upon for its mindless and commercials-riddled entertainment one day and then, suspending all advertising and most regular programs, engaged in an image blitz on a stunned audience that, having had so little introduction to the events leading up to them, regarded them as unprovoked, inexplicable, and without any historical connection to the dramatically altered present.

The image bombardment and the relative blackout of comprehensive world news by a largely irresponsible commercial medium did much to get Americans in the mood for the war that is still being waged and lost to this day. By comparison, the broadcasting day following the attack on Pearl Harbor proceeded pretty much according to schedule; it was only gradually that commercials made way for—or merged with—public announcements, that comedians told topical jokes and soap operas dealt with the realities of war. Before one can fully understand what it means never to forget, one has a lot of catching up to do with the world.

Having spread this “important message” about the imperative of keeping up with and following up on the allegedly out-of-date and the seemingly unrelated or tiresomely repetitive news of the world, the broadcastellan journal will go on a brief hiatus and won’t resume regular day-to-day postings until the beginning of 2007, aside from a few scattered reports of cultural events and reviews of seasonal radio and television offerings. If you have glanced at, read, perhaps even enjoyed, a few of the roughly two hundred essays shared here throughout the year, I encourage you to drop me a line.

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“These Three”: Gay Lovers Straightened through Air-conditioning

The history of taboos sure is shocking. I mean, it is shocking to realize what, over the years, has been hidden from view and banned from our discourse. Interracial marriages. Same sex unions. Gender reassignments. While denial can be as harmful as our tendency to designate, you would have to have been living under that proverbial mineral formation or petrified by the religious fundamentalism that passes for faith these days to regard such realities as unmentionable. They may not be widely understood or tolerated, let alone embraced, but as the facts of life in all its complexities they are too much in the public eye to be ignored.

Simeon Solomon, The Sleepers and the One who Watcheth (1870; detail)

Often argued to be responsible for foisting a liberal education on the masses, Hollywood has, in fact, played an important role in keeping quiet about many aspects of our everyday lives. Beginning in the mid-1930s, and for several decades thereafter, the Production Code curtailed what could be shown or talked about in motion pictures.

It was on this day, 6 December, in 1933, that James Joyce’s Ulysses was ruled to be “not obscene,” lifting the ban on its sale in the US; but that, aside from its narrative structure, hardly made Ulysses ( 1922; previously serialised 1918-20) a hot property in Tinseltown. Writers who wanted a share of the profits to be made by selling stories or streamlining them for the silver screen had to deal with the strictures of the code and learn to rework their material accordingly.

One playwright who accepted this challenge was Lillian Hellman, whose 1934 stage success The Children’s Hour was brought to the ears of American radio listeners on this day in 1937.

The Children’s Hour tells the story of two women whose teaching careers and personal lives are wrecked when one of their pupils alleges that they are having an intimate relationship.  Like Hellman’s 1936 screen version of The Children’s Hour, titled These Three, George Wells’s radio adaptation for the Lux Radio Theatre drowns out the unspeakable by suggesting instead a triangulated relationship with a virile heterosexual male at its center.  Wedged between Stanwyck and Mary Astor that night was the presumably irresistible Errol Flynn.

Hollywood had long thrived on love triangles, although they were rarely as ambiguous as in the above painting by the aforementioned queer artist Simeon Solomon.  Indeed, the three-cornered plot is key to the first new genre of production-coded cinema—the screwball comedy, in which heterosexual marriage is challenged by old flames or new rivals until it is ultimately reaffirmed. Although—or perhaps because—These Three is more concerned with libel than with forbidden love, with allegations rather than physical acts, the revision eliminates the unmentionable to make room for a rumor that can be talked about.

As if determined to remove any doubts as to the straightness of the radio adaptation and all those associated with the production, Lux host Cecil B. DeMille opens the program by letting listeners in on a “secret,” a story that had “completely escaped the headlines.” The unheard-of item amounted to little more than the announcement of a recent marriage. According to DeMille’s anecdote, the unconventional Ms. Stanwyck had just attended the wedding of her stableboy, danced with the hired hands, and “made them all forget” that she was the “groom’s boss.” The Lux program presented itself as clean entertainment without wanting to appear stuffy.

What is more stuffy—and objectionable—than the codes governing radio and motion pictures is the subsequent silencing of the history of such hush-ups. A description of the Lux broadcast in a 1995 reference text, for instance, keeps mum about the pedigree of the adaptation by alluding vaguely to “[c]ertain aspects of the stage production’s plot” that “made a straight film version out of the question.” Phobic histories like these not only contribute to our ignorance of past inequalities. They keep us from moving beyond them.

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All the Way to the Grave: Radio Laughs at Television

What do you think is the greater challenge to traditional blogging: vlogging or advertising? Like many folks who value their time and their eyesight, I try to look past commercials; if that is impossible, I will avoid the program or web journal in which they are embedded or pose as entertainment. At least, I still have a fighting chance to escape advertising on television by zapping or zipping through the image blitz that makes a rubble of storytelling by blasting holes into it so deep and for periods so prolonged that sometimes I find it hard to pick up the pieces and recall what happened just a few minutes earlier.

Advertising (and our savvy to get around it) may very well have “killed” television as many of us knew it. Yet what might have given it life (in America, at least) was the public’s resentment of the radio hucksterism that flourished at the end of World War II after years of relative restraint. It was on this day, 5 December, in 1948, that broadcast wit Henry Morgan appeared on the Fred Allen Show to tell its host that radio had “killed itself” with all those giveaway programs and “singing jingles.”

Radio was “all washed up,” Morgan declared. That’s why he was pursuing a career in television instead. To prepare for his move to the new and ostensibly superior medium, he had enrolled in a course at “television acting school.” All the “big stars of television” were in his class; among them “two trained seals,” a “dancing bear” and Ed Sullivan. Graduates would receive a PhD—a “Picture of Howdy Doody,” that is.

The less than flattering picture Morgan painted in quips was Allen’s personal and much publicized view of commercial radio. His own program would soon become a casualty of commerce, greed, and the promotional forces behind it. However dismayed at the developments in radio, which he described as a “by-product of advertising,” Allen did not have much faith in television, either, let alone a blind one. Together with Morgan, Allen sent up the media upstart that seemed to be copying what one of their contemporaries labeled radio’s “seven deadly sins.” Turning the threat of television advertising into a laughing matter, the two radio comedians seemed to be laughing at matter itself.

“The radio tells you all about a lot of things that nobody sees,” Morgan grumbled. Unlike millions of Americans lured into swapping their wireless consoles for a very small screen, Allen sensed this to be the non-visual medium’s greatest gift: “With the high cost of living and the many problems facing him in the modern world,” Allen later wrote in his memoir Treadmill to Oblivion, “all the poor man had left was his imagination. Television has taken that away from him.”

And yet, that very broadcast of Allen’s Ford motor company sponsored show pointed up how successful radio was at killing itself. Contrasting radio and television thrillers and commercials in their sketch, Allen and Morgan had the studio audience in stitches, no doubt by pulling out all sorts of props for their demonstration of television’s pull: you just had to see it in order to be relieved from the burden of having to believe.

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Shaking the Spear: How an All-Male Cast Can Tame a “Shrew”

It’s been a while since last I saw The Taming of the Shrew performed onstage—and I didn’t even get to see the feat accomplished. Halfway through, a curtain of rain descended on the players (Tracey Ullman and Morgan Freeman among them), putting a premature end to one of those open-air affairs at New York’s Delacorte Theater. Maybe Kate was lucky that night, for Petruchio sure rains on what might have been her parade. The ending is a challenge for today’s producers and can be an ordeal for the audience, especially those who regard the theater as a political correctional facility of post-modern society. It’s an ending that can make or break both Kate and the play she’s stuck in; for, depending on how The Taming is framed, the bride may well be. So, when I finally got to see Kate reach the end of the matrimonial tether last Friday, in a production by the touring Propeller company, I felt that something had gone terribly wrong.

Propeller stages Shakespearean dramas with an all-male cast, an approach at once traditional and revisionist, considering that female roles used to be performed by male actors and that we, more than four hundred years on, are not at all conditioned to see such casting as conventional, no matter how open-minded we might think ourselves.

Last year’s Propeller production of The Winter’s Tale was so sensitive and engrossing as to de-politicize gender, despite the fact that the guys in gowns sport prominent chest hair and bald spots. It was a revelation to see those tokens of testosterone atomized in tender humanity. The man-handled Shrew, by comparison, is as subtle as the Birdcage—and that nut-strewn coop is no place for a chick-lit contender like Katherine. Strangely enough, cross-dressing had little to do with her mistreatment.

As adapted by Edward Hall and Roger Warren, The Taming refuses to put Petruchio in his place by taking advantage of the apparatus provided, a frame that, as in the 1937 radio version starring John Barrymore, is often removed, leaving the make-believe sparring of Kate and Petruchio unmediated. Petruchio is, after all, a character in a play staged for the purpose of making fun of Christopher Sly, an irresponsible, common drunkard. The frame, to be sure, can be set up as a ready excuse for the misogynist picture within. It is the shaming of Sly that can make the taming of Kate tolerable—and the Propeller players won’t have it that way.

Their version adds a prologue in which Sly is seen standing up his bride at the altar; but instead of getting his come-uppance by becoming the plaything for a nobleman disgusted by the looks of a vagrant lout he encounters, Sly himself is being cast in a raucous shrew-taming comedy and, instead of being a confused if fascinated onlooker, gets to don the mask of Petruchio, a stage costume that becomes an extension of Sly’s macho persona. He is not so much humiliated than humored. And while he has to be reminded in the end that what he performed was merely the illusion of a taming, he is still free to exit the stage as he entered it, free to take women or leave them hanging.

It is the revision of the opening scene that makes the ending so troubling. If Sly gets to play out a fantasy, one he so clearly relishes, without having to deal with the responsibilities of matrimony, the framed Taming is like an episode of the Jerry Springer show featuring the antics of a self-centered, insensitive, and hormonally overcharged jerk. Impersonated with swagger and brawn by Dugald Bruce Lockhart, Sly (in the role of Petruchio) gets considerably more sinister and less likable as the taming proceeds; but, without any chastising or moralizing, he still comes out on top, whereas Kate is reduced to a stoic Victorian heroine, suffering yet submissive.

Taming is a domestic comedy that turns on you in its bitterness; yet Simon Scardifield’s Kate is hardly in on what fun there is to begin with. Instead, she comes across like a desperately mousy housewife so little in need of taming—as all the flamboyant and badly behaved men around her are fiercer far than she—that we pity her before we had much of a chance to cheer her on. I appreciate a fresh take, if fresh it be; but, this time around, Propeller seems to have spun its gay blades out of control.

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Riot Study: Hunting Catholics with Barnaby Rudge

Well, I would have been reading and writing today, had I not been caught up in upgrading my Blogger account and messing with my “classic” template while trying to take advantage of a few new features. With the exception of added labels, I ended up keeping things as they were, but I will probably tinker with the design over the weekend. Meanwhile, I just got back from the theater (an all-male production of Taming of the Shrew, which I am reviewing shortly). To remind all those of us blogging or shopping or hopping about town that it might be a “far, far better thing” to pick up one of his volumes, young Mr. Dickens has been installed here to usher in the festive season of fireside reading.

It is undoubtedly due to that sentimental ghost story A Christmas Carol and its countless re- or disincarnations that Dickens is so closely associated with December, the darkest month of the year, cheered, as if to reward or placate believers of some faiths, with tunes, tinsel, and treats. No Scrooge in the matter, I got tickets to a stage production of A Christmas Carol starring screen veteran Ron Moody, best known for his role in the musical Oliver! (a more recent production of which I discuss here). Young Twist and old Scrooge, those two have outlasted most of Dickens’s children, in the shadow of which vast nursery lies one Barnaby Rudge.

In the spirit of charity, I have picked up this ill favored Barnaby Rudge, serialized in 1841. Subtitled “A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty” it is a fictionalized account of the anti-Catholic uprisings in England, Protestant anxieties stirred by a member of Parliament opposed to the Catholic Relief Act. With the Pope’s visit to Turkey, a Muslim country whose faith he offended a few months earlier, and the multi-million sex abuse claim settlement by the Catholic diocese in Los Angeles making headlines these days, this old page-turner promises to be topical reading. No escapism here.

Say, what’s your literary treat for the “holidays”?

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Many Happy Reruns: John Dickson Carr

Well, it has long been an ambition of mine to write a whodunit. Red herrings, fishy alibis, a murky pool of slippery suspects, and a case so deep it would have kept even the likes of Sherlock Holmes, Charlie Chan, and Hercule Poirot angling for clues, chapter after chapter, much to the delight of an equally confounded readership. Take my word for it, I have tried. Otherwise, I submit to you this piece of evidence, which I dug up from where it rightly belongs and promptly edited for the occasion:

“I am going to kill somebody, tonight,” was written on the invitations. Glossy, who had sent them, was dressed for the part, greeting the crowd that had come for the killing. She looked marvelous, her dress and body the result of careful design, a shrewd calculation in fabric and flesh [. . .]. 

It was my sister Veronica who had arranged the party. I had stayed out of it. After all, I am merely a party chronicler. Or so I thought.

“Why, it’s simply deranged,” I heard Glossy squealing, surrounded by a throng of professed admirers; it was a favored expression of hers, which she employed almost universally, except to describe her own behavior. She was sober enough to observe the crowd of friends and colleagues she had drawn toward her in an effort to gain control in a moment of crisis. Tonight, she wanted to be seen in order to see for herself. To see them all, at once. She scrutinized the scene as carefully as her condition allowed. I, for one, knew that her noisy enthusiasm was nothing but an act. Glossy had confessed as much to my sister: she feared that the days of her reign as the queen of daytime drama were numbered and suspected that someone had already planned a ruthless regicide. So, being the center of attention was not just vital for her ego, but for her alter ego as well. Glossy was on the lookout for the conspirators, and I guess the fact that she knew most of the guests provided hardly any comfort at all. . . .”

Perhaps you should have taken my word for it. It’s best to leave such murderous plots to the masters and mistresses of the craft. Experts like John Dickson Carr, for instance, who was born on this day, 30 November, in 1906. Throughout the 1940s, his plays were often heard on American and British radio, on series like Suspense, Cabin B-13 and Appointment with Fear, all of which were designed to showcase his writing. He also served as host and narrator of the mystery anthology Murder by Experts, for which services his latest novels were being duly promoted.

“Mr. Carr brings to his radio work the same superlative craftsmanship and high integrity that distinguish all his novels and short stories,” Messrs. Ellery Queen contended in their anthology Rogues’ Gallery (pictured above), prefacing Carr’s play “Mr. Markham, Antique Dealer,” which was produced by Suspense and broadcast on 11 May 1943.

Having discussed Carr’s work at length in my dissertation and on several occasions in this journal, I have come to the conclusion that the whodunit, especially when combined with the “how’sitdone”—the locked room puzzle in which Carr specialized—was best suited to the printed page, where it can unfold gradually and be appreciated at a pace determined by the reader, rather than the merciless clock of the broadcast studio.

Now, clocks feature prominently in “Mr. Markham.” One of these old-fashioned chronometers is set up to hold a clue, but their ticking is more effective in setting the scene, creating the atmosphere of the antique dealer’s establishment, and reminding the listener that time might be running out for at least one of the characters. In the one-dimensional, that is time-only medium of aural storytelling, suspense is far more effective than surprise. While not devoid of suspense, Carr’s plays attempt—and often fail to—startle the audience with a final twist that, rather than being dramatized, is tagged on in a cumbersome and less than thrilling epilogue.

Is Carr’s brand of whodunit a radiogenic genre? You may judge for yourself by listening to the British as well as the American version of “Mr. Markham.” It is hardly fitting to celebrate someone’s birthday by opening fire. Then again, there’s Glossy, lying in a pool of blood.

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The History [of] Boys: Alan Bennett and the Gay Social Science

I often ask myself whether I am. History,  I mean.  Not that anyone is opening a museum dedicated to my life, a definitive space for finite time as it is now in the works for 1970s pop act Abba.  To be history, I suppose, means to be quite past it; insignificant, irrelevant, outside of what matters now, someone either to be forgotten or to get nostalgic about.  To be part of history, on the other hand of time, means not only to think of oneself in context but to be thought of as belonging to it, as fitting into its continuum. And to make history is to take part in its continual shaping, be it wilful or inadvertent, by bringing something (or someone) about.  So, am I a manifestation of history? Am I making it? Or am I beyond its bounds as determined by those who assume the authority of authoring it in word and image?

Such questions have been whirring through my mind after watching The History Boys, the film adaptation of the acclaimed stage play by Alan Bennett, the well-known British radio raconteur.  The History Boys documents the quest of a group of students who, in an effort to make something of themselves (or to please their folks), try to get into one of Britain’s most influential or prestigious institutions of higher learning by reading (that is, studying) history.

Bennett sets the action, such as it is, in 1983, which means that, by now, those ambitious, playful and bewildered youngsters would be middle-aged men, like myself (pictured), a spinning forth of their fictional lives the film encourages in its “whatever became of” epilogue.

One of them did not make it this far into the 21st century, having given his life for his country (or those governing it on his behalf) by serving in the military.  Most of his classmates, it seems, have gotten little out of their college education, other than the satisfaction of being able to brag about it.  Except for the one, most vulnerable, least sure of himself, who took his schooling to heart and decided to pass it on.  That one, according to the queer history of Mr. Bennett, is the outsider who, unlike his closeted professor, has a chance to be, make, and impart what he has learned about himself.

At first, I was irritated by the imposed pastness of the action, as much as I can relate to the period as one of adolescent confusion.  Why bother to recreate a certain historial age, to impose a make-believe historicity on the growing-up experiences portrayed, thereby diminishing or obscuring their relevance? How would their story play out if were set in the present day, rather than a past that looks, by virtue of being bygone, quaint to those who have not lived it and to those whose vision is warped by nostalgic longing?

Might not such an act of looking back serve a purpose other than to suggest a past beyond change? The history of those boys turned men, individuals who were not always in control of their paths (as accidents shaped them as much as their actions), is not so much over as it is crossing over into the present.

The History Boys strikes me as an old man’s gesture of bridging what is often thought of as a generation gap, a chasm into which recent lessons and those still present to teach them are tossed to be discarded.  It is an encouragement to learn not from books and experience alone, but from intercourse with those around us, those whose stories might not get into the books other than by being thought of while reading.

The body of our histories, like the history of our bodies, cannot be got at from a distance, scrutinized in clinical detachment by ostensibly objective onlookers; it has to be lived, felt and shared in order to matter.  Beyond the groping for bare facts in hopes of an elusive naked truth, beyond the stripping of traditions exposed as lies and the weaving of postmodern thought in a garish display of thinly veiled self-pleasuring, imparting an understanding of history is a mentoring in the half-forgotten sense of the word.

 “Pass the parcel.  That’s sometimes all you can do.  Take it, feel it and pass it on.  Not for me, not for you, but for someone, somewhere, one day.  Pass it on, boys [and girls].”