1926 AND ALL THAT, ON THE AIR
Fresh from doing cartwheels in the Bake Off musical up the road, Haydn Gwynne is now a strangely convincing Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin , in pinstripe. Oh, and a studio singer doing Abide with Me. Which is definitely something to celebrate. Actually, I wanted to love everything about this new history-play by Jack Thorne about the General Strike of 1926 and the battle between the government and the fledgling BBC, if only because I rather revere the idealistic Reithian early history of radio. It starts well, and Laura Hopkins’ multilayer design is glorious: behind gauze at first we glimpse and hear the clanging racket of mines, heavy industry and railways, which suddenly ceases to become a song of union solidarity. And as the light rises we see that the set is made also of vintage radios, hanging microphones , musical instruments and speakers. Radio is a marvellous fresh invention around which bustle the keen new staff of the four-year-old “British Broadcasting Company” . There are snatches of singers and comedians (Beatrice Lillie doing “don’t be cruel to a vegeta-buel, remember a lettuce has a heart”, etc), an onstage musician, sound-effects people snapping celery and crunching gravel, bits of drama, HG Wells deploying his famously squeaky voice: all the romance of early radio. A few anachronisms jar for us aficionadi: Sandy Powell’s sailor act didn’t start till the 1930’s, and mentioning “Jennings” on Children’s Hour is bizarre when the character wasn’t invented for another 20 years. But it’s fun.
At the head of it all was John Reith. Stephen Campbell Moore gives him to us not as the towering martinet of legend but a man still young, starting to understand how immense is this tool put into his inexperienced hands: a way of democratically offering information, education and entertainment. But this is the first of nine days of General Strike: Britain coming to a halt, democracy stretched to breaking point as strikebreaking volunteers man trains and buses. There are imminent riots and street battles and real dark poverty . No newspapers can come out, so suddenly the little BBC – previously confined to one bulletin at 7 pm so as not to upset the press barons – is a vital source of all-day information and communication. Churchill has set up the “British Gazette” as a substitute newspaper whose message is entirely the government’s, and wants Reith to deliver that message too. Not the point of view of the strikers in their real poverty and desperation. Or, crucially, a speech by the Archbishop of Canterbury advocating goodwill and a policy change by the stubbornly dug-in government.
It is, as Thorne has said, a fascinating turning-point in history: if broadcasting had been quashed or commercialized on the American model rather than becoming a licensed independent Corporation, there would be no BBC now. Gwynne as the level-headed PM Baldwin is no disappointment, and nor is Adrian Scarborough’s puckish, grumpy Winston Churchill as his Chancellor: a man impatient for the top office, aware of his Gallipoli debacle and the fact that his rigorous gold-standard policy of the year before was partly responsible for the strikes. He is determined to use “an instrument like the BBC to the best possible effect”. The scenes between politicians and Reith in the first half though do drag a bit; it gets better when the big issue arises of whether the Archbishop can go on air. Reith agonizes: his lieutenant Eckersley (Shubham Saraf) wants him to stand firm. The government wants the BBC, not them, to be seen as refusing the broadcast. It’s a crux: and handled strongly.
But Thorne is unable, given a sacred-monster like Reith, to stick to a play of ideas and political conflict without soupy emotional overdrive. This is provided, in lavish bucketfuls, by the great man’s bisexual yearnings and confusions, both in personal flashbacks and during the 1926 decision. We know from his own writings about his profound romantic love for Charlie Bowser, a youthful friend; also that Charlie (a pretty, lively Luke Newberry) was the original suitor of Muriel Reith at the same time Reith proposed , some years before. We know that back then, years before the events of the play, Reith was distressed by the idea of their boyish friendship being hampered by marriage. But there is no record of repeated homosexual kissing, or of a fight over Muriel ending in a full mouth-to-mouth snog . And honestly, I do not quite believe it. Maybe a degree of extended sexual/emotional imagination by the author is fair enough, wanting to show not the immense, granitic, righteous Reith his colleagues remember in memoirs but a 21c idea of the man’s inner life. But somehow I just don’t buy the picture of this son of the manse, in the middle of a professional crux, lying sobbing curled up on the floor while his employee (Kitty Archer, every inch the brisk BBC pioneer woman) brings him tea and a ginger biscuit and offers to lie down beside him.
Donmarwarehouse.com. To 7 October
Rating three.
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