[This is the script for a talk I presented at the at an event I co-organized with playwright Lucy Gough, held at the National Library of Wales on 22 February 2024. Previously introduced on my blog, the presentation has been edited for publication here.]
Croeso y bawb, and welcome to “Danger.” Sounds exciting to be saying that: “Welcome to ‘Danger.'” The full title of the play we are commemorating today is “A Comedy of Danger” … written and first produced one hundred years ago. Now, why did I think that Aberystwyth would be just the place to mark that anniversary?
Well, when the idea came to me to stage an event like this, we had not long come out of lockdown, when the possibility of tuning in remotely to plays experienced somewhat of a renaissance.
Twenty-five years ago, when I first listened remotely to “Danger,” I had no notion of the play’s close relation to Wales. I was an international student, catching up on English-language literature in New York. I had no idea, either, that I would end up living here in Aberystwyth, a strange-looking reference to which I stumbled across and over in the script and didn’t know how to pronounce.
I first encountered “Danger” as a recording of an American broadcast dating from 1936, when the play was still considered to be experimental. But, unlike the original version of “Danger” that you will hear this evening, the American recording left me clueless about this line from the play, a statement that serves as the title of this short introduction to today’s event: “I’d expect anything of a country like Wales.”
It is uttered, in exasperation, by one of the three English characters in the play. Out of context, the reference to Wales struck me as gratuitous when I first heard it.
So, that is the question: What constitutes the “Welshness” of this play? And why commemorate the 100th anniversary of “Danger” here, at the National Library of Wales?
Well, to begin with, the play is set in Wales. It features the Welsh hymn tunes “Aberystwyth” (also known as “Jesus, Lover of My Soul”) and “Ar Hyd y Nos.” And, “Danger” is widely considered to be the first play written especially for radio—anywhere.
So, a play set in Wales, featuring a Welsh choir singing “Aberystwyth,” that is reputed to be the first-ever radio drama? Reason enough to celebrate it here. Well, maybe. Just how Welsh is “Danger”?
“Danger” was written by Richard Hughes. Now, Hughes was born in … Surrey. Sorry. And the play was first broadcast by the BBC … from London.
That was Richard Hughes speaking, toward the end of his life, reflecting on that broadcast.
Radio, one hundred years ago, was still transitioning from a do-it-yourself playground—of building sets, of catching and sending signals—to a centralised, laws-governed broadcasting medium for home listening.
Many tuning in back then would still have used a homemade crystal set, and they would have listened using headphones rather than loudspeakers. Tuning in was an intimate experience, as this one-hundred-year-old cartoon published in the Radio Times suggests.
If you invite guests to your home to listen to the wireless, you might well end up being left out of the conversation.
But all that was changing. Radio broadcasts were promoted as public events for shared listening on mass-manufactured sets that became part of the furniture in pretty much every home.
Bear that in mind when you listen to “Danger,” as community and self – what holds us together and what threatens to keep us apart – is a theme very much at the core of this play.
Richard Hughes was in his early twenties when he scripted “A Comedy of Danger. He would go on to write two major twentieth-century novels in the English language, A High Wind in Jamaica (1929) and The Fox in the Attic (1961).
Hughes might have been born in Surrey—his mother having lived in the West Indies—and his career getting underway during a prolonged stay in the United States, … but he identified as Welsh. He was proud to say that his ancestry, if dated back to the time of the Tudors, was Welsh.
“After three hundred years,” Hughes declared, “both my grandfather and my father would have been taken for Welshmen anywhere; and I myself, from the first time I visited Wales, at the age of eleven, felt a homesickness to go back there that I never felt for the south country where I was born and bred. I determined then and there to live in Wales as soon as I was able.”
Life in Wales is the subject of many of Hughes’s writings. Hughes’ first stage play, The Sisters’ Tragedy, which predates “Danger,” is set in the “Welsh hills.” And A Comedy of Good and Evil (1924), which was mounted in London about six months after the first broadcast of “Danger,” was published replete with specific notes on the pronunciation of a “South Snowdon” accent that Hughes called for in his script.
Hughes also formed a Welsh theatre company and advocated for the formation of a National Theatre for Wales.
“Danger” was announced in the Radio Times, as part of an “Evening of Plays” produced by the distinguished actor-manager Nigel Playfair. And although there are other plays on the programme, and those plays precede “Danger” by a few minutes, “Danger” was the only play on the programme expressly written for the medium.
“Danger” also has the distinction of being one of only a very few plays for radio in Britain to appear in print prior to the 1950s.
Radio plays—a queer hybrid of drama and literature that is not quite either—were then performed live. And most of them vanished into the thinness of the airwaves, never to make as much as a ripple, except in the memory of some listeners.
The legendary actress Ellen Terry reportedly tuned into “Danger” and wrote in to say that she was thrilled by it.
“Danger” proved more durable than most early radio plays. It was produced again and broadcast from Cardiff two months after the London broadcast. Still, no recordings survive.
This is what the broadcasting studio would have looked like. And the producer’s task was to turn it into a coal mine, before the eyes of an invited studio audience, and to turn the homes of those tuning in into a gallery or passage of that mine to boot.
Here is how Hughes explains it:
A sceptical reviewer of the broadcast scoffed, “one would think that a little more might be required” to transform living rooms into coal mines than simply turning the lights off. Hughes would resort to the same device two years later in “Congo Night,” a lost melodrama for listening in the dark … or by firelight.
Listeners of these plays are invited to be participants in creating the illusion rather than being passive recipients of ready-made make-believe.
“Danger,” which came to be known as “the mine play,” is also … mind play.
As we shall experience tonight, the spirit of make-believe is written into the play. But so are dispiriting ignorance and prejudice, as expressed by one of three English characters:
“I’d expect anything of a country like Wales! They got a climate like the flood and a language like the Tower of Babel, and they go and lure us into the bowels of the earth and turn the lights off. Wretched, incompetent—their houses are full of cockroaches—Ugh!”
What “Danger” does is to turn that “Ugh” into an “Ahhh.” Wales is demonstrated to be a place where anything might happen. For those trapped in the mine, it becomes a transformative experience. It does not follow that, when the lights go out, benightedness sets in.
The mine is a stand-in both for Wales and for the wireless: A medium of hope at a time when you can’t seem to find it. It is a hope that sustains you—“Ar Hyd y Nos”—all through the night.
Richard Hughes was not always hopeful about how efforts to draw attention to Wales might be received by a Welsh audience. As he commented in a broadcast from Cardiff in 1951: “If there’s a play or a book or a film supposed to depict us we flock to it in hundreds: and then out we come, shaking our heads at each other—’Terrible! Terrible!’ Honestly, have you ever heard a Welshman have a good word for anything of general appeal ever written about modern Wales?”
Perhaps he was anticipating your criticism.
The Welsh in this play do not get to have much of a voice. But the play nonetheless listens to Wales. The Welsh are heard to be—are making themselves heard—laboring and singing as one in adversity.
It is the mine—as a representative of Welsh culture—that is making the noise: gurgling, rumbling and roaring. The mine is alive, even though—just two years before the General Strike of 1926—it is not exactly alive and well.
Talking, Hughes argued, can accomplish only so much. “[T]here has been a distinct shift in Wales,” Hughes said in another one of his Cardiff broadcasts, “from being a peculiar nation to saying that we are a peculiar nation. Instead of talking Welsh as a matter of course, people now talk about talking Welsh; instead of being Welsh as a matter of course, we now talk about being Welsh.”
As an integral part of Welsh culture, the resonant mine is made peculiar and particular—a character as distinct as a Welsh choir.
What “Danger” conveys is the threat of silencing and the refusal to go unnoticed even if attention is focussed on other communities in Britain that the industries of Wales serve.
Hughes remained hopeful of radio as an instrument for the forging of communities, as a medium for the representation of regional voices and the building of a national conversation.
“[R]adio,” Hughes wrote in 1957, “has shown sufficient vigor to survive its first crisis, the coming of television. “But,” he added, “I think the program authorities themselves will have to play their part. There is much for them to ponder; there are new policies to be formed: they will have to begin to take radio drama seriously.”
“Only then can we hope,” Hughes added, “that someday the true birthday of radio drama will be dated not January 15th, 1924—the night of the first broadcast of A Comedy of Danger—but a night thirty years later: January 25th, 1954, the first broadcast of Under Milk Wood.”
As Hughes reminds us, there are further opportunities this evening—and this year—to commemorate contributions by people living in Wales to literature, drama and modern media.
“I’d expect anything of a country like Wales,” can become a line spoken in appreciation of ingenuity and imagination as exemplified by “Danger” and “Under Milk Wood.”
Ingenuity and imagination—the resourcefulness of making the most of seemingly nothing at all. That was—and is—the spirit of radio, the spirit that unites us here today.
Harry Heuser 