AMBRIDGE OVER SLIGHTLY TROUBLED WATER
Tim Stimpson is a long-serving modern writer on Radio 4’s The Archers, and loves it: so his play is about the dawning, 75 years ago, of this “continuing drama” or – previously “everyday story of country folk” (it hates being called a soap). It’s a good idea: an origin-story of a project that met with doubt and suspicion but caught the national imagination by reflecting a span of unremarkable characters living, loving, and growing older in workaday lives (a bit like Coronation Street, actually, though they don’t like that comparison either).
Hearing about it and heading curiously to the Barn I thought it might simply be set, firmly and lovingly, in the hungry1950s: when postwar rationing still applied and farming need to be persuaded to take in new ideas, replacing heavy horses with tractors and old ways with agrochemicals. That was when Godfrey. Baseley came up with the idea of “a farming Dick Barton” to popularize the new ideas by getting female listeners (presumed to like gossipy stories) to tell their conservative farmer husbands about them. It was a tentative pilot series, rather resented by the suburban-set Mrs Dales Diary (the first radio soap) but it took off at warp speed, soon making its pretty-unknown middling actors into national celebrities. They got invited (until it was stopped) to get into rustic costume and pretend to be the real characters at Conservative fetes.
This tale is told, and worth hearing, but in search of meta-theatre fun Stimpson and director Joseph O”Malley decide present it as if a 2025 director called Jonty (James Mack) was – self-funded and passionate – trying to make a play about Baseley in the hope of getting the job of Archers editor ( It is unclear quite how, since there is not as yet much of a business in selling complete radio dramas to Radio 4, their only home). So he dramatizes Baseley’s arguments with Controllers, and depicts the first cast’s recruitment, relationships, and pay demands (though we don’t get Gwen “Doris” Berryman constnatly resigning, as she did).
The result is commendably full of good physical jokes about how to do spot effects with bicycles pumps , ironing boards and yoghurt for the squelchy delivery of lambs, and I can see why all the meta-theatre-play-about-makig-a-play stuff was useful in getting in lots of voguish jokes about influencers, Strictly, social media etc. But it constantly risks being confusing and overdemanding of the actors as they move rather fast between three character-voices. Thus Olivia Bernstone plays a 2025 celeb with one regional accent, the 1950s actress Ysanne Churchman with another, and Christine Archer with a slightly posher accent as the wealthy-farmer’s daugher who marries Phil. He, meanwhile, is in 2025 mode a keen tyro actor, in 1950 an aspiring writer called Norman Painting turned into an actor by Baseley, and in character then of course, Phil. Kieran Brown gets off more easily, playing a 2025 screamingly-camp actor and turning into the anxious, driven middle-Britain bureaucrat Baseley . Though he also gets a quick cameo in the Goons, which came second to the ARchers as best-entertainment in the 1953 radio awards. And Rosanna Miles is her modern self as Fiona, then June Spencer as Peggy and – well, Peggy.
OK, you’re confused. Trust me, you will be. They all make a very good fist of switching characters and periods, but cutting through the onion-skins (or russian-doll layers) requires more clarity. The upside, though, and the reason we left happyish, is the director’s device of going dark as the cast play certain classic scenes. Not least the death of Grace Archer on the night of ITV’s launch, which we hear on radio, as the nation did, the curtain closed on the speakers.
On Alfie Heywood’s atmospheric radio-studio set that does offer the frisson of audio-drama wonder. It’s the moment – as Jonty says- when “millions of people make an act of collective imagination”.
barntheatre.org.uk to 11 oct
rating 3
theatreCat 