Category: Radio Plays

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Caught At Last: Some Personal Notes on The Mousetrap

Well, we ended the year in a jam. None too comfortable in a tight squeeze, I nonetheless joined the throng on Waterloo Bridge for the customary year-end countdown and fireworks. We had just gotten out of The Mousetrap, which snapped shut for the 22957th time last night. Opening in 1952, Agatha Christie’s thriller—which started out as a radio play titled “Three Blind Mice” back in 1947—is still packing them in like red herrings in a jar at the St. Martin’s Theatre (pictured below). So, what’s the attraction?

Like most readers, I discovered Christie’s mysteries in my early teens; as a gay male, I did not feel myself represented by the average juvenile fare and was too puzzled and scared to seek out works that might hold a mirror to my androgynous if pimply visage. The impersonal killings perpetrated and neatly solved in the quaint whodunits of the late “Queen of Crime” were just the kind of rest cure my troubled mind seemed to demand.

There was something reassuring in the curlings of Hercule Poirot’s mustachios, the armchair as an intellectual retreat, the assorted young ne’er-do-goods among Christie’s long lists of suspects, as well as the less-than-physically fit busybody of that little old lady who could. It inspired me to try my brains at composing a whodunit, even though, despite numerous attempts, I only managed a revenge comedy whose German title loosely translates as “And All the Worst for the New Year.”

Nowadays, the Christie puzzlers with their lazy prose and perfunctory characterizations do no longer seem quite so satisfying to me; but, as if in gratitude for seeing me through those terrible years, I still catch up with Christie and her works from time to time, whether on television, in the theater, or on my travels. A few years ago, quite by chance, I found myself in the author’s quarters at the Pera Palas Hotel in Istanbul—on the anniversary of her birth, no less.

Back in December 2005, I took in a stage adaptation of And Then There Were None (briefly discussed here). And Then is one of the few works in the Christie canon that is not merely clever but genuinely unnerving.

While well oiled, The Mousetrap is rather less snappy and gripping, despite its opening in the dark to the strains of “Three Blind Mice” and a woman’s piercing scream. The rather superior Gay Lambert (as the troublesome Mrs. Boyle) aside, the current cast of The Mousetrap, which originally starred Sir Richard Attenborough (pictured here on the poster for the play), is as capable as a group of figures in a game of Clue. Little more is expected of Christie’s characters, which fall flat when they are meant to be round.

There is, of course, that queer young fellow named Christopher Wren, just the kind of chap whose welcome presence in the generally impersonal board game tableaux of Agatha Christie, told me, all those years ago, that there was a place for the likes of me in a world filled with hazards, traps, and processed cheese.

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Playing It by Ear; or, "What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?"

Well, luckily we are not in Glasgow in the middle of a storm, a misfortune that befell us last New Year’s Eve. The festivities having been called off due to fierce winds, we ended up back in our hotel room shortly before midnight. This year, we are in London and, without having made any definite plans or arrangements, determined to see a show in the West End, go out for a meal, and watch the fireworks along the Thames. To be sure, this is not the time of year to be playing it by ear; but, even without reservations, there is always plenty to see and do in a big town like London. While I don’t like to come to town without a clue about what is on offer at museums and in the theater, I prefer not to have our days all planned out ahead of time. History tells us that getting lost is a great way to discover something new.

Yesterday, heading out from our hotel near Pudding Lane, where the Great Fire of 1666 got started, we took the wrong bus and ended up at King’s Cross. Being there, we decided to have a look at the recently reopened St. Pancras Station. The old Victorian terminus has been turned into a memorial to poet John Betjeman (1906-84), whose words you will find under foot, where they might be drowned out by a stampede of travelers. How wonderful it was to stand there, not having to rush anywhere, taking in the sights and sounds of the old yet new and ever changing scene.

“Imprisoned in a cage of sound / Even the trivial seems profound.” The words my camera captured ring true today. On New Year’s Eve, those cages (the bells with which Betjeman was fascinated) are going to rattle all over the world. And the trivium of a few seconds passing will assume the utmost significance in the eyes and ears of billions.

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Oranges Are Just About the Only Fruit

Well, apart from grapes, perhaps. Having left the Big Apple behind us, we started off our trip to London with a roll in the Haymarket. We were not offered any oranges, the vending of which, traditionally, is associated with prostitution; but despite the absence of Cyprians (or Orange-wenches” as referred to in the play), the scene we came upon at the Haymarket was salacious nonetheless. In said 287-year-old Theatre Royal (whose rebuilt venue I captured here in its present condition), The Country Wife was first performed back in 1675. This season, William Wycherley’s bawdy comedy is back, if somewhat condensed (its prologue cropped) and refurbished, with a few visual puns and stagecrafted metaphors added (such as a rendering of the expression “when pigs fly”). The dialogue should best be left unchanged, at least if the revision is as lame as that overheard at the Haymarket that night (something about a doctor being nothing without patience, a pantomime-worthy piece of paronomasia rather more subtle in the original).

Wycherley’s comedy has attracted some of the great actresses of the British theater, including Judy Dench, Helen Mirren, and Maggie Smith. Cast in the role of Lady Fidget (as Edith Evans before her), Patricia Hodge did not quite manage to make the character memorable; but as an ensemble piece, this production succeeded nonetheless as a naughty diversion nowadays referred to as a guilty pleasure.

Mind you, we had consumed a few stomped grapes too many and struggled at first to keep our eyes firmly on the action. Luckily, though, keeping up with this clever Wife is bound to keep anyone up. Take it from an old fruit.

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“Evening Primrose”; or, Attention, Last-Minute Shoppers!

Well, there I was. 2 AM, walking around Macy’s on Herald Square. The department store has been open around the clock for days in what probably amounts to little more than a publicity stunt, and a costly one at that. As I looked around me in the nocturnal crowd, it struck me that folks had dropped in to warm up, avail themselves of the restrooms, or merely to satisfy their curiosity, behavior unlikely to translate into an appreciable increase in sales. Now, I am not a happy consumer at the best of times; I derive little enjoyment from shopping, other than the merchandise I am often too tired, ill-tempered, or tight-fisted to drag to the counter. At that hour, having just imbibed a few gin and tonics at my favorite West Village watering hole, I was certainly not in a position to make any informed choices or last-minute purchases.

Navigating the mercantile maze, I was reminded of John Collier’s short story “Evening Primrose” (1940), as it was adapted for radio’s literary adventure anthology Escape. A distant and sinister forebear of A Night at the Museum, “Primrose” is the eerie account of the after hours goings on in just such a locale (called Bracy’s, no less).

A weary and destitute poet, desirous to break free from the world, has decided to squat, of all places, in the quiet of a closed emporium, where he sets out to make a home for himself behind a pile of carpets. Exploring the premises one night, he discovers that he is not alone.

Those tuning in to Escape on 5 November 1947 were invited to imagine themselves

groping in the midnight dimness of a gigantic department store and suddenly you realize that you’re not alone; that a hundred eyes are glaring at you from the shadows, a hundred hands reaching for your throat, and your most urgent desire is to . . . escape.

They were merely after the contents of our wallets; but I was anxious to escape all the same. The “Evening Primrose” is not in bloom this season. The secret society of non-shopping consumers Collier envisioned would have no chance in the glare of eternal commerce, their struggle for self-preservation crushed by the nightly invaders of a territory reclaimed for a paradisic if parasitic existence.

I was more in my territory strolling around New York City’s outdoor markets. At the holiday fair on Union Square, I caught up with my old pal Kip Cosson (pictured) at the fair on Union Square. My frame being too large for the clothes sporting his jolly, colorful designs, I walked away with a signed copy of his children’s book Ned Visits New York. It tells the story of two pen pals, a South Pole penguin and a New York City mouse, and their sightseeing tour of the town. Department stores, I am pleased to report, did not make the list of attractions. Ned, after all, was feeling “crowded and stressed” and had left his home in “need [of a] rest.”

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Lines of Business: Roxy, the Rockettes, and the Radio

You pretty much have to line up for anything in a busy town like New York City. It is hard to believe that when I first visited the city I did not know how to queue. Not that this kind of orderliness is entirely unknown to the Germans, who call it “Schlange stehen” (literally, standing snake). We used to do it for bread, but we don’t do it for the circus or for the busses and trains that get us there. Perhaps, that kind of discipline is too closely associated with days of famine and fascism, in which more than an evening’s entertainment was on the line.

Anyway. I didn’t mind lining up in front of the Radio City Music Hall to see those gals whose line of business is . . . standing in line. The Rockettes, whose fancy legwork is the highlight of the Radio City Christmas Spectacular, now celebrating its 75th season. Of course, my disorderly mind went wandering. I was thinking about “Roxy” Rothafel, the man to whom we owe this spectacle.

Back in 1925, when entertainment by radio was still in its pre-network infancy, Roxy, then Director of the Capitol Theater in New York City, experimented in on-air theatricals, marvelling (in Broadcasting: Its New Day) that radio was the

great spiritual anodyne of the time. None but the hungry hearts that need it most can appreciate, even dimly, what it means. It is a new sunshine, a new hope in life, bringing with it immeasurable joy. It is all hopelessly beyond the understanding of the blasé who are bored by even the most sensational amusements that modern life has to offer.

According to Roxy and his co-author Raymond Francis Yates (who had already penned the Complete Radio Book),

[t]here is a deeply human side to broadcasting that cannot help but reach far down into the conscience of an impresario fortunate enough to win public acclaim. The searching nature of radio makes this so; radio is a magic fluid that finds its way into every crevice of human life. At the same instant it is seeking out the little family group in the cabin of a snow-covered sand-barge wintering in the dreary North River at Hoboken as well as those who are lounging in the luxury of a Fifth Avenue mansion. The lonely souls in an ice-covered, wind-lashed lighthouse on the North Atlantic coast are fellow-listeners with the humble folk in the murky tenants of New York’s lower East Side. The little farmhouse nestled in the snow-clad hills of Maine, the lonely trapper of the silent Yukon, the patient sufferers on hospital cots, the meek inmates of almshouses, all are reached by radio. To some, radio is but a small part of racy life of varied sensations, but to hundreds of thousands it is a great part of a life of spirit-crushing monotony.

Surprisingly, the enterprising Roxy argued that “advertising by radio does not offer a solution to the problem of making broadcasting self-supporting on the scale that is necessary for national success.” Ruling out “voluntary contributions from the public,” they envisioned “equipment that will confine reception from certain studios to those who pay a monthly or yearly fee.”

He was off there. Meanwhile, I am off again, standing in line for some classic cinema treats (and a bit of art) at the MoMA . . .

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Christmas Shopping in New York . . . with a Certain Tightwad from Waukegan

Well, it “hardly seems possible, but it’s true. Only twelve more shopping days till Christmas.” The timely if rather superfluous reminder, along with a suggestion to stock up on a certain gelatin dessert, was proffered by Don Wilson, the rotund and jovial announcer for the Jell-O Program starring Jack Benny, a former vaudevillian who had put money in his purse by leaving the defunct circuit for the lively, money-spinning kilocycles. On this day, 11 December, back in 1938 the show, incongruously opening with “Hooray for Hollywood,” was broadcast from New York City. Since I shall be bargain hunting in said Metropolis later this week, I am tuning in, however belatedly, in hopes of some free money-saving advice from the old skinflint.

There was trouble in the air when bandleader Phil Harris told Benny that tenor Kenny Baker was not hand-on-mike to provide the customary musical interlude. Baker had borrowed a few bucks, allegedly to see the World’s Fair, which would not open until the following April. Benny offered to fill the dead air pocket with one of his dreaded violin solos, upon which the orchestra threatened to desert (until Phil digs in with “A Pocketful of Dreams”). The oft-belittled fiddler was thwarted, for once; but he did get to play with Jascha Heifetz a few years later (as pictured above).

Even his faithful valet Rochester (of whose hardship and penury I spoke here) was a no-show. He was up in Harlem “enjoying a little Southern hospitality.” No doubt, the gang dreaded having to go shopping with or receiving gifts from Benny, the horrors of which experiences, like the parading endured at Easter (and discussed here) were being documented annually on radio and television, to the amusement of the American public.

“An electric razor for Don, a necktie for Kenny, a chorus girl for Phil,” Benny checks his list. At a department store perfume counter. Benny and Mary Livingstone get a whiff of Springtime in the Bronx. “Oh, yeah, it’s lovely that time of year,” Benny quips, “with the bagels all in bloom.” When Benny is taken aback by the very thought of having to pay $10 for an ounce (or $4000 for a gallon) of something more “oulala,” the impatient saleswoman suggests that he run “some violets through a wringer and make it [him]self.”

It is only the first in a series of humiliations, which also involve a less-than-nimble-fingered pickpocket and a mishandled fitting. “Go back to California and squeeze an Orange,” an ill-tempered floorwalker suggests when Benny and Livingstone exhibit the nerve to ask for the necktie counter.

Best peeled by the thick-skinned, the Big Apple is a tough town, all right. Maybe “Hooray for Hollywood” (for which Benny and company were soon to depart) was not so incongruous an opener after all. Just how pitiless a town it was Benny would learn a few weeks later. In January 1939, the high-salaried comedian who squeezed laughter out of a pinched penny was indicted on three counts of illegally importing over $2000 worth of jewelry into the US. According to Gaver and Stanley’s There’s Laughter in the Air (1945), previously consulted here, Benny initially pleaded not guilty; he changed his mind around Easter and received a 10,000 fine, as well as a suspended sentence of a year and a day.

I, for one, shall be traveling to New York with an empty suitcase. Should it get quiet here in the meantime, as it has on previous occasions, it is because I am being too cheap again to pay for wireless access I insist on being complementary, without my having to order an overpriced cup of coffee.

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". . . between the zodiac and Orson Welles": A Play Scheduled for Pearl Harbor

Well, it wasn’t exactly business as usual on this day, 7 December, back in 1941. Mind you, lucre-minded broadcasters tried hard to keep the well-oiled machinery of commercial radio running. There were soap operas and there was popular music, interrupted in a fashion rehearsed by “The War of the Worlds,” by updates about the developments of the attack on Pearl Harbor (previously commemorated here). Unlike on the day now known as 9/11, when advertising came to an immediate standstill to make way for propaganda and regular (that is, commercial) programming ceased for hours and days to come, radio back then was slow to adapt. There was no precedent; and, having ignored the signs of the time, not much preparation.

Minding the business of its sponsors, broadcasters had no master plan for a response to the masterminds behind the plans for the master race and its allies. It was, however briefly, overmastered; or flummoxed, at least. For an industry relying on minute timing, the attack and subsequent declaration of war were most inopportune. Big business was, for the most part, not behind a war that would translate into major financial losses.

Until that day, broadcasters had counted on being inconsequential; it was the commerce stimulated by the sales talk punctuating the chatter and musical interludes proffered “in the public interest,” that mattered.

The Screen Guild was fortunate. After previous crowd pleasers like “Penny Serenade” and “If You Could Only Cook,” the Gulf Motor Oil sponsored Hollywood-rehash factory had scheduled a play that just fit the bill. For that fateful night it had prepared a live production of Norman Corwin’s “Between Americans,” previously staged in June 1941. “By one of those mystic and infallible arrangements between the zodiac and Orson Welles,” the playwright would recall, this broadcast was the

first uninterrupted half-hour on the CBS network after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. All afternoon the news had come pounding in—comment, short-wave pickups, rumors, analyses, flashes, bulletins. Programs of all kinds were either brushed aside or so riddled by special announcements that they made no sense. But by 7:30 PM EST all available news on the situation was exhausted, and the Screen Guild, which had long ago scheduled “Between Americans” and Welles for this date, was given clear air.

According to Corwin, the greatest living American radio dramatist, indeed the greatest radio playwright of any time anywhere (whose 97th birthday I celebrated here), the “staggering news of the previous hours made the show far more exciting than it had any right to be.” The studio audience reacted enthusiastically, a response the playwright attributed to the moment, rather than to anything of moment in his play.

A war only four hours old is an emotion, an intoxication, a bewilderment [. . .]. People felt reassured by it. They heard the piece as a statement of faith. They were moved; they laughed extra loud; they applauded like mad when the show was over. I am certain it was Pearl Harbor that made the show so electric that night, and not so much the work of Welles, Corwin, or Harry Ackerman, who directed it.

“Between Americans” had not been prepared for the day; indeed, it had been produced five months earlier, with actor Ray Collins (whose voice Welles regarded as the best in the business) as narrator. According to Corwin, who is none too fond of the play, there were some 22,000 requests for scripts and rebroadcasts. No wonder, with lines like these:

You ever asked yourself what America means to you? Does it mean 1776? “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean”? Big business? The Bill of Rights? Uncle Sam? Chances are it means none of these things. Chances are it means something very personal to each of you. Something close to your heart, which you’d miss like the very blazes if you were stranded abroad. It might have nothing to do with quotes from Madison or Acts of Congress. It might be just the feeling of crisp autumns in New England and the smell of burning leaves. It might be the memory of the way they smooth off the infield between the games of a double-header. It might be a thing as small as your little finger [that is, a cigarette].

“Big business” and personal memories. They merge at the moment of listening. Big business counted on that.

The 7 December 1941 program is a fascinating record of an industry coming to terms with the role it was called upon to play. The commercial structure remained remarkably intact; but the play was being shrewdly exploited as “one of the most timely programs ever heard on the Gulf Screen Guild Theater:

Broadcast at any time, we believe this program would make every American’s heart beat a little faster, make him hold his head just a little higher. But since the tragic and foreboding news that came today, this program, “Between Americans,” now becomes an American Odyssey. In just a moment, our story will begin.

“But first,” listeners had to hear the words from the sponsor, who had this topical message prepared for the occasion:

Right. And here is an easy way to change from a pessimist into an optimist. If you are wondering now how long you may have to keep your present car, and wondering too if it will last, if it will stay in good condition, just look on the bright side of the picture. Remember, when you give the wearing parts of your car good protection that helps it stay young and act young a long, long time. So, give your automobile the modern method of lubrication . . .

Yes, radio was a well-oiled machine . . . until the rationing of its parts set in.

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“Yak”: Listening to the Chief of the Daredevils, on His Birthday

Well, talk about stunt broadcasting. I am listening to Daredevils of Hollywood, an obscure series of radio documentaries of sorts, syndicated and transmitted in the United States during the late 1930s. Daredevils celebrates the achievements of those doubles who took it on the chin or jumped off cliffs for the likes of John Wayne and Clark Gable. Chief among them was Yakima Canutt (a tribute page devoted to whom you will find here). Former rodeo star Enos Edward “Yak” Canutt was born on this day, 29 November, back in 1894 (or 1895, according to the Internet Movie Database; or 1896, if the Wikipedia is to be relied upon). His seven decades spanning resume as a double, stunt coordinator and second unit director includes many of the films I have enjoyed over the years, blockbusters like In Old Chicago (1937), the to Canutt very painful Boomtown (1940), and the seminal Stagecoach (1939), a kind of fast moving Grand Hotel on wheels. Canutt did “any stunts except those with animals,” all horses aside.

Now, I am fairly allergic to tumbleweed and, however partial to whiskey, generally avoid the Republic saloon scene; I am more of a Paramount kind of guy with a soft spot for Warner Bros., even though one unlikely Texas Lady (star of the aforementioned Boom Town) is prominently displayed in my room, locally known as the Claudette Colbert Museum. No matter how many I might have pulled in my lifetime, I have little to say about stunts other than what I learned from Lee Majors and his sidekick Howie in The Fall Guy.

After the death of the Academy Awarded stuntman in 1986, Alistair Cooke devoted a “Letter from America” to his life and art, convinced that not one in ten thousand listeners had ever heard of Canutt, no matter how often his name had appeared in the credits of Hollywood films as diverse as Gone With the Wind and Ben-Hur. The fate of the stuntman, a profession largely done in by CGI, was to remain invisible. So, it is hardly a surprise that there is no mention of “Yak” in my undergraduate Stagecoach essay “How the West Was One.” That is where the radio comes in; it hands me the candle to put on King Canutt’s cake.

Programs like Daredevils of Hollywood are the Wikipedia of the pre-digital age. They are just as reliable or maligned; but they are far more intimate in the gossip they whisper in your ears. They introduce me to so much I would have otherwise missed out on, so much I am apt to overlook rather than look up. How thrilling it is to hear the voices of those behind the scenes. And, as it turns out, Canutt was quite the storyteller.

The script permitting, he sure could, you know, yak about the “tragic,” the “funny” and the “sometimes annoying” aspects of his work—if only the announcer had not felt obliged to cut him off for the sake of commerce. Then again, Canutt knew all about commerce. He risked his life for it.

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All About Tallulah! (Never Mind “Wardrobe, make-up, or hair”)

Well, Tallulah Hallelujah! How could I pass up the chance to pass on this anniversary double treat? On this day, 16 November, in 1950, Tallulah Bankhead grabbed the microphone to entertain the multitude, first in a recreation of her role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. Two year later, she was heard in the part that might have gone to Claudette Colbert (had she not given her all to make sure that Three Came Home) but is now almost exclusively thought of as belonging to Bette Davis: All About Eve (previously discussed here in its pre-filmic radio version). When I featured clips from these performances in first adventure in podcasting, I was unaware that both “Lifeboat” and “All About Eve” were broadcast on the same day, two years apart.

Now, la Bankhead is more often thought of as a legend than an actress; that is, she is foremost a star, and only secondarily a performer. We generally do not have access to the stage appearances of Hollywood stars of the studio era, a couple of stills and reviews aside. Radio theatricals, however, can give us an inkling of those ephemeral performances. So, once again, I am conjuring up the Tallulah spirit, as I did when last I placed her image on my Quija board.

Bankhead’s performance in the Screen Directors Playhouse production of “Lifeboat,” broadcast on this day, 16 November, in 1950, serves to remind us how good an actress an icon can be. As an uncommonly humble Alfred Hitchcock tells the audience in the introduction to the play,

. . . I think you should know that Lifeboat is not what we call a director’s picture.  There are no trick sets, no camera tricks, in fact, no tricks at all.  When the director approaches such a picture, he offers up a little prayer and delivers himself wholly into the hands of his actors.  Since they are very good actors, the result is just as you should hear it now.

Indeed, the production is very fine, with Bankhead serving as narratrix of her character’s experience aboard that ill-fated vessel. That time around, there were no calls for “Wardrobe, make-up, or hair,” no matter how many times the eccentric star uncrossed her legs.

The Theater Guild adaptation of “All About Eve” was more in keeping with the Bankhead persona in those Big Show days. “Thank you, Mr. Brokenshire,” Bankhead seizes the microphone from her announcer,

and good evening, darlings.  The play we are performing for you this evening on Theater Guild on the Air is called—and I never could understand why— All About Eve.  All About Eve.  True, there is an Eve in it, and what a part that is.  There is also a glamorous and brilliant leading lady of the theatre whose true identity has been kept a secret too long.  Tonight, darlings, tonight baby intends to do something about that.

What a bumpy night it turned out to be. Those two years sure made a difference. You might say, that the campy “Eve” is an extension of or promotional vehicle for the Big Show and the Tallulah image in general. Character had given way for caricature.

How odd it is that such camp is so personal to me; and yet, when I think of Bankhead, I am inevitably reminded of my years in New York City. Sitting in my favorite local park by the East River while preparing for my dissertation on radio drama by listening to a few programs (oh, the hardship a doctoral candidate has to endure), I got to talk to a fellow sun worshipper who, learning about my uncommon soundtrack, asked whether I had come across the name of Florence Robinson, who was an old friend of his. No, I could not say I had; but I soon discovered that Robinson had been Tallulah’s co-star in “All About Eve.”

Just about that time, in those early days of the 21st century, I got to see the Tallulah Hallelujah! starring Tovah Feldshuh in the title role (no, not Hallelujah). A few years later I became friends with the “producing associate” of the show. So, listening to Bankhead, however outré or larger than life she might sound, triggers many a personal memory.

Then again, listening is always personal, as sounds pass the threshold of my ears, entering my body in a way images never could, and keep reverberating in my mind. While no longer surprised, I am still disappointed when I flick through biographies like the one by Joel Lobenthal I am clutching above, accounts of an actor’s life that make so little of their roles on radio and the role radio played during the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s.

Sure, the The Big Show was not being ignored (even though George Baxt, who novelized Bankhead’s broadcasting experience in the volume shown here, barely gets a mention). Beyond that, though, Bankhead’s “many radio appearances” are summed up as involving “acting in sketches or trading patter with Hildegarde, Fred Allen, Kate Smith, and others.”

Given that recordings are now so readily available, the general disregard for the medium, expressing itself in a line like “[r]adio was Tallulah’s only medium for the next six months,” becomes an intolerable distortion of American popular culture. I wish more attention was being paid to the cultural force of the old wireless, a wish that, aside from all the nonsense and dross you might expect here, is the raison d’être of broadcastellan.

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Dumb? Wait!: Pinter & a Pair of Chekhov’s Shorts

Well, I’ve been struggling to keep up, which makes me feel and appear rather dumber than usual. I have gotten into the habit of editing my journal entries online, of dumping scraps here in hopes of making something of them, eventually. “We must beat the iron while it is hot, but we may polish it at leisure,” Dryden famously said. As a poet, composing in solitude, he probably never thought of doing the polishing in public. At any rate, given the relative obscurity of broadcastellan, I often assume that my composing here is very nearly done in private; but the realization that one looker-on had landed here after scouring the web for references to “Dr. Harry Heuser,” no doubt with the intention of checking my credentials, rather put me off the idea of performance editing. And yet, as dumb as it might be not to wait until such time as the half-cooked turns into a dish fit for tossing into this dumb waiter of a vehicle, I am not easily reformed. It is quite literally too late for that now.

I just got back from an evening of theater. There is always time for that; and the offerings here in the small seaside town of Aberystwyth, just outside of which I reside, is gratifyingly varied. Once again, I can’t wait to share my thoughts, however dumber they will be expressed in the shoddy prose of the moment. Before my memories go stale or my mind blank, I have got to share my thoughts on the Compass Theatre Company‘s production of Pinter’s “Dumb Waiter,” with a “Pair of Chekhov’s Shorts” thrown in.

The shorts suited us just fine. “The Evils of Tobacco” and “The Proposal” (translated by Neil Sissons), are comedy sketches Chekhov wrote for the vaudeville stage early in his career, “Evils” being a monologue and “The Proposal” a one-acter for three characters. Both pieces deal with what is generally thought of as the end of comedy, marriage, by inviting us to see the end of marriage as comedy.

The henpecked husband ostensibly lecturing about the “Evils” of smoking is really more keen on, and indeed desperate to, share his thoughts about his miserable existence as dictated by his controlling spouse. The monologue was delivered with humor and pathos by Michael Onslowe, who was seen in all three pieces. “Evils” would work well on radio, I thought. It is one of my hard-to-kick habits always to think of what I see in the light (or darkness, as it were) of its radiodramatic potentialities.

Nor does “The Proposal” pose any great challenges to the adaptor for radio, even though Sisson deftly exploits the physical aspects of comedy in the slapstick treatment of the suitor’s nervous disposition. As the title suggests, “The Proposal” tells of an intended match, the advancement of which goes awry. However old and slight these two plays, the laughter was not derived from our perception of their datedness; nor did they greatly rely for their effect on the audience’s nostalgia for this kind of entertainment. They simply still work as comic banter.

Pinter’s “Dumb Waiter” is rather more dependent on what is unexpressed, even though Gus, one of the two hapless hitmen waiting for their next job, seemed to have echoed our attitude toward this final play on the bill when he exclaimed: “It’s worse than the last one.” Commenting on the dump of a hotel in which he and his partner Ben are waiting to carry out their next assignment, he adds: “At least there was a wireless there.” Is “Dumb Waiter” radiogenic? Surely not in the way that Pinter’s “A Slight Ache” plays with your mind.

Still, the titular contraption prominently mounted in the center of the stage, and the speaking tube attached to it, made me think of the wireless that Gus was missing. Indeed, it very nearly made me go “Yoo-hoo! Is anybody?” as I thought of Molly Goldberg’s old apartment and the role her dumb waiter played in her everyday communications with the unheard Mrs. Bloom. I guess, a day without radio to me amounts to something like an existential void. It is certainly more than “A Slight Ache.”