A comedy of danger (Hra s nebezpečím, 1924)

Přidal: Přemek |

Srpen 4, 2006

„Sensační hra“. Richard Hughes. Další tvůrci a interpreti nezjištěni.

Osoby: Mary, Jack, Mr. Bax, 1. hlas, 2. hlas, 3. hlas.

Premiéra 15. 1. 1924, London BBC.

Znovu nastudováno v roce 1973 pod názvem Danger.

Slovenská verze

Text in: Klasické rozhlasové hry 1923 – 1945.

Lit.: anonym: Konfrontace. In Divadelní noviny 21-22/1963, s. 5 (zpráva).

Lit.: anonym: Radio Drama at 90. Some of the landmarks in the history of Radio Drama and Shakespeare on the radio. In web BBC Radio 4, b. d. (článek). – Cit.: (…) To my mind, one of the best plays ever broadcast (and I do not say this because I had the pleasure of producing it) was „Danger“ by Mr. Richard Hughes. Here was something that was written for wireless only; the scene was in a coal mine, and was meant to be heard and not seen. If this play had been produced in a legitimate theatre the stage would have been in total darkness; the players and the action would remain unseen. It was, therefore, ideal for broadcasting, and probably not so good for use in a theatre. In fact, I think it gained by being broadcast, as a sense of distance for such a setting was an inducement to the right atmosphere.

Nigel Playfair ‚Popular Wireless‘ 9 March 1929

Those were the days of the silent film and our „listening play“ (as I dubbed it) would have to be the silent film’s missing half, so to speak, telling a complete story by sound alone. Yet even the silent film didn’t, strictly speaking, rely on pictures only. It used subtitles. Usually there was a sad man thumping appropriate themes on a piano. Some of the grander cinemahouses even employed an “ effects man „; he wound a windmachine and pattered peas on a drum for the storm scenes; he accompanied the galloping cowboy with clashing coconut shells. We thought of using a narrator but agreed it would be a confession of failure. No, we must rely on dramatic speech and sounds entirely … and it had never been done before.

Richard Hughes – BBC Home Service 1956 (…)

Lit.: Jones, Dedwydd: Mining the seams of radio history – Richard Hughes and A Comedy of Danger. In web The Stage, 9. 5. 2005 (článek). – Cit.: A Comedy of Danger was the first play ever commissioned specifically for broadcast on radio. Dedwydd Jones digs deep into the history of its author, Richard Hughes, and the work itself

Born on April 19, 1900 to Welsh parents in Weybridge, Surrey, novelist and dramatist Richard Arthur Warren Hughes got off to a flying start. At 17, Hughes’ housemaster at Charterhouse sent his first writings to the Spectator, where they were well received. At Oriel College, Oxford, Hughes soon found himself mixing with the likes of TE Lawrence and WB Yeats and editing Oxford Poetry with fellow Carthusian Robert Graves.

Hughes graduated in 1922, went home to North Wales and founded the Portmadoc Players. They played in a space known as The Brew House, a highly suitable address for an embryonic Welsh National Theatre. While on holiday, Nigel Playfair, the director of the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, saw Hughes’ productions and brought them to London. With plays at both the Lyric and the Royal Court, Lloyd George and the Prince of Wales were soon sending their congratulations. Heady wine for a 22-year-old.

Hughes went into a frenzied period of writing – Gipsy Night and Other Poems, Lines Written Upon First Observing an Elephant Devoured by a Roc, Ecstatic Ode on Vision and Meditative Ode on Vision.

Then, on invitation from Nigel Playfair via the BBC, he embarked on the world’s first ever radio play. In Hughes’ own words: “I was asked by the BBC, in January of 1924, to write a play for effect by sound only, in the same way that film plays are written for effect by sight only.”

Thus he created the first ‘listening play’, an experiment in a new medium, which has been since considerably developed. He wrote the play overnight and set it in a coal mine as it provided a convincing setting of darkness in which sound was more important than the visuals. Produced by Nigel Playfair, A Comedy of Danger was broadcast from the BBC’s London Station, Marconi House in The Strand, on January 15, 1924. It received a healthy amount of attention. Next day the headline of the Daily Mail referred to “Drama Thrills by Wireless”.

When I contacted Steve Cleary, curator of drama in the British Library’s Sound Archive, to have a listen of the play, I wasinformed that, sadly, no recordings were technically possible at the time. Not even the currently obsolescent tape existed, only ‘snippets’ on acetate and scratchy ones at that. Like the songs of the nightingale in John Keats’ famous ode, Danger has faded “into the forest dim” and is now “buried deep in the next valley-glades”. No full spoken record of the world’s first voice play exists.

French savants baptised the medium of film “the seventh art”. Radio drama was soon christened the eighth. The BBC termed Danger “a radio origination” as opposed to an “adaptation” – reading from a prepared text. With Danger, this new form of drama was well and truly on the way.

And what are the first words ever heard in this eighth art? It is the stage direction, “A Coal Mine”, given by an announcer. It is a flooded gallery in a Welsh coal mine, to be exact. The three trapped visitors in the mine are English and speak impeccable upperclass-ese. “This beastly coal mine”, “buck up, Mary, old girl” and “you cruel beasts” are a few of the scripted remarks that sound very dated to contemporary ears.

It also contained the very first broadcast strictures on the Welsh: “I’d expect anything of a country like Wales. They’ve got a climate like a flood, a language like the Tower of Babel… Wretched! Incompetent- their houses full of cockroaches!”

But the singing of the trapped miners does the trick. “God, those chaps have courage! They don’t want to die, so they sing hymns. If we can’t, then we must behave like gentlemen.”

Life is indeed a cruel comedy, with musings veering between, “It’s strange how little chaps wonder what will happen to them after death. Every man dies before his time. There’s such a lot to learn on the other side,” and “Who’ll feed the parrot?”

Hughes detailed the first radio drama voice-directions in the universe, which included ‘a gruff voice and a stilted manner of speech’, followed by ‘sarcastically’, ‘with mock solemnity’ and ‘shocked’.

The first Welsh words heard across the ether came from the Welsh hymn ‘Ar hyd y nos’, All Through the Night. In keeping with a play written directly for radio, sound effects were specified to conjure up the coal mine atmosphere. The first sound effects rumbling in the Valleys were ‘a distant explosion with a long echo’, ‘a hiss of water’, ‘stumbling steps’, ‘tapping’, ‘sound of a pick’, ‘strong blows’ and ‘sound of coal falling’. I will not reveal the surprise ending.

Although Hughes’ first passion was the theatre – he remained vice president of the Welsh National Theatre from 1924 to 1936 – he went on to write the classic novel A High Wind in Jamaica (1929). Chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred best novels of the 20th century, it was made into a striking film in 1965, with Anthony Quinn and James Coburn.

In 1932, Hughes moved to Laugharne, west of Swansea, and lived in the ancient castle there. By cosmic coincidence, he lived side by side with Dylan Thomas, the man who, arguably, wrote the most loved ‘listening play’ in the world, Under Milk Wood. In fact, so close were they that Thomas leased the famous boathouse from Hughes and even worked on Milk Wood there. Must be something in the air. I have just booked a room in Dylan’s renowned Brown’s Hotel. Perhaps a late night draught or two in Milk Wood itself might inspire a divine comedy for the present country.

Hughes was made a member of the Order of the British Empire in 1946. Most of his later years he lived at Mor Edrin enar Talsarnau in north Wales, dying on April 28, 1976.

Lit.: anonym: Radio Moments 972. A Comedy of Danger – 1st play written for radio – 1924. In web Audioboom, 22. 12. 2014 (článek + ukázka k poslechu). – Cit.: Radio seems a natural medium for the play, or maybe it doesn’t. The first to be commissioned especially for the wireless in Britain was ‘A Comedy of Danger’, aired in January 1924. The playwright was 23 year old Richard Hughes: “I was asked by the BBC, in January of 1924, to write a play for effect by sound only, in the same way that film plays are written for effect by sight only”. The production was set in the darkness of a coalmine, where listeners and characters alike were at the same disadvantage. Both could ‘see’ nothing.

Enjoy here a slice of that first production, and sadly slices are all that remain. It is followed by comment from Head of Programmes, Val Gielgud, who insisted, correctly, that radio demands a careful sort of writing; and a great deal of listener attention too. (Val was the elder brother of Sir John Gielgud) In this statement, and in other BBC publications from the time, great emphasis was placed on the importance of the listener paying attention to what is broadcast.

‘What’s happened?’. ‘The light have gone out’ were the key lines which launched the new art of radio theatre proper.

The play, which had originally been broadcast live, was remade and broadcast in February 2013. Richard Hughes died in his beloved Wales on April 28th 1976.

Lit.: Hrnčíř, Tomáš: První autorská rozhlasová hra zavedla posluchače do podzemí. Nyní slaví 95 let. In web ČRo 1 Radiožurnál, 15. 1. 2019 (článek). – Cit.: V úterý je to přesně 95 let od uvedení první autorské rozhlasové hry na světě. Tenkrát ji mohli slyšet posluchači britské stanice BBC. Zatímco tvůrci filmu v té době objevovali, co lze říci pouhým obrazem, mistři zvuku zase zkoušeli, jak vyprávět příběh bez viditelných postav. Historii i novým postupům v natáčení rozhlasových her se věnuje Radiožurnál.

Mary a Jack se baví o tom, že nikdo nemůže navštívit vlastní pohřeb v uhelném dole, kde je uvězní nešťastná náhoda. Taková je hlavní zápletka Hry s nebezpečím, kterou napsal britský básník Richard Hughes. Odehrává se v podzemí, kde postavy v naprosté tmě vůbec nic nevidí. Tím se rozhlasoví tvůrci chtěli více přiblížit posluchačům.

BBC inspirovala i šéfrežiséra Českého rozhlasu Aleše Vrzáka. „BBC je základní kolébka a ta jejich produkce je tak obrovská, že v ní můžeme najít jak perly, tak odpad. Jak to vždy bývá při takovém množství práce. Vedle toho se můžeme podívat zpátky a inspirovat se vlastní historií. Co v 60. letech dělal pan režisér Horčička (Jiří Horčička, pozn. red.), to pro mě byla velmi inspirativní a výjimečná práce,“ popisuje Radiožurnálu. Pokud je autor ochotný své dílo pro vysílání upravit, je to lepší, myslí si.

Široký obor

„Samozřejmě se můžeme setkat i s tím, že autor řekne ne, že je to závazná podoba a nesmí se změnit ani písmeno. Takže potom se hledají různé obezličky, jak do toho vstoupit, pokud chceme něco změnit. Většinou záleží na vzájemné chemii mezi autorem a režisérem,“ pokračuje. „Rozhlasová hra běží od toho příběhu jednoduše vystavěného až po experimentální tvary. Je to široký obor,“ dodává Aleš Vrzák.

K letošním 90. narozeninám Milana Kundery připravuje Český rozhlas čtení na pokračování z knihy Nesmrtelnost, do které svůj hlas propůjčil herec Lukáš Hlavica. Nesmrtelnost odvysílá ve zvukové podobě Český rozhlas letos na jaře.

Lit.: Hejma, Alan: Před 100 lety odvysílala BBC první rozhlasovou hru ve formě fiktivní reportáže. In web iDnes, 18. ledna 2024 (článek). – Cit.: V polovině ledna 1924 došlo k důležitému mezníku ve vývoji světového rozhlasového vysílání. Poprvé v historii si totiž mohli posluchači vychutnat rozhlasovou hru. Šlo o čistě akustické drama „Comedy Of Danger“, tedy „Nebezpečná komedie“, jejímž autorem byl britský spisovatel, básník, romanopisec a dramatik Richard Hughes.

První skutečnou rozhlasovou hru odvysílala britská BBC a jednalo se ve skutečnosti o jakousi fiktivní reportáž o hornících uvízlých v zavalené šachtě anonymního velšského úhelného dolu.

„Radio drama“, tedy rozhlasová hra, se od té doby stala pevnou součástí rozhlasového vysílání po celém světě. Do učebnic rozhlasové historie zřejmě navždy vstoupila adaptace „Války světů“ režiséra Orsona Wellese z roku 1938, která byla ztvárněna natolik sugestivně, že ji posluchači ve Spojených státech považovali za reálnou reportáž z útoku Marťanů na Ameriku.

Česká historie rozhlasové hry začala 8. června 1926 divadelním záznamem hry Josefa Kajetána Tyla „Jiříkovo vidění“.