Oldal 69 [69]
JONATHAN BIGNELL
work by Shakespeare, Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw on radio or television
alongside dramatizations of canonical novels by Jane Austen and George
Eliot, for example. The stifling of new, experimental or foreign drama that this
policy produced was relieved by the creation of the Third Programme, whose
output was strongly influenced by the appointment of Donald McWhinnie as
Gielgud’s deputy in 1953, working with Michael Bakewell and Barbara Bray
to commission and produce drama scripts.'* Later, when Gielgud stepped
down, he was replaced by Martin Esslin, who had just produced his book on
the Absurd which linked and praised Beckett and Pinter.’° When taken to
lunch by Gielgud, Esslin reported that Gielgud told him, “I hate Brecht, I hate
Beckett, I hate Pinter. But I know what my duty is. That’s why I’ve appointed
you to deal with these people.””° Bakewell, Bray, Esslin, and McWhinnie were
supporters of the new drama of the period, especially Beckett and Pinter,
with interests in experimental uses of the radio medium,” and a significantly
different attitude began to prevail after Gielgud retired.
All That Fall was directed by McWhinnie and broadcast on the Third
Programme on 13 January 1957, featuring Patrick Magee. The French version
of Endgame, Fin de Partie, was broadcast on 2 May 1957, produced by
Bakewell, using the same cast as the Royal Court Theatre’s world premiere of
the play three weeks previously, including Jean Martin and Roger Blin, with
Jacques Brunius as a narrator. Beckett’s Embers was broadcast on 24 June
1959, directed by McWhinnie, with Magee and Jack MacGowran. Shortly
afterwards, on 29 July 1959, BBC broadcast Pinter’s first play for radio, A Slight
Ache, directed by McWhinnie and featuring Maurice Denham, Pinter’s wife
Vivien Merchant, and Pinter himself (under the pseudonym David Baron).
Pinter’s A Night Out was directed by McWhinnie for a Third Programme
broadcast of 1 March 1960 and repeated later that month. Beckett’s version
of the French New Wave writer Robert Pinget’s The Old Tune (La Manivelle)
was produced by Bray and broadcast on 23 August 1960, with Beckett’s
collaborators Magee and MacGowran appearing again. Pinter’s The Dwarfs,
written for radio and produced by Bray, was on 2 December that year. It was
BBC radio that first presented Beckett’s Endgame on 22 May 1962, ina version
adapted and produced by Bakewell and a cast that included Maurice Denham
and Donald Wolfit. Beckett’s Words and Music, with music by John Beckett,
was produced by Bakewell and featured Magee and Felix Felton. Its first Ihird
18 Ibid., 137.
1% Martin Esslin: The Theatre of the Absurd, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1961.
20 Chignell: British Radio Drama, 653.
2 Everett Frost: Fundamental Sounds: Recording Samuel Beckett’s Radio Plays, Theatre
Journal, Vol. 43, No. 3 (1991), 361-376; Jonathan Kalb: The Mediated Quixote: The Radio
and Television Plays and Film, in J. Pilling (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Beckett,
Cambridge, Cambridge University, 1994, 124-144; Donald McWhinnie: The Art of Radio,
London, Faber, 1959.
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