‘A Stage of the Mind’: Hamlet on Post-War British Radio

Summary

Writing in July 1949, after a week of ‘Hamlet mania’ on the BBC's Third Programme, the radio drama critic of The Listener was led to wonder whether ‘Hamlet, as social and psychic portent, has come home to roost in our day and age’. He was responding not only to the quirks of one programme's scheduling, but to the way in which Hamlet had come to be widely acknowledged, as a Times editorial put it, as ‘the Play of Plays’ in Britain in the years during and immediately after World War II.

Played ‘cut’ or played ‘whole’, played in the corrupt text of the First Quarto, played with scenes transferred or with its archaisms cruelly modernized, its hold on the public imagination is seemingly unshakeable. It remains the one English classic which the modern man is confident he would recognize and enjoy in whatever outlandish convention it was played.

What is significant here is the emphasis on the reordering of the play, whether by ‘scenes transferred’ or ‘outlandish convention’, together with the confidence that, such is its intrinsic and enduring modernity, some essence of Hamlet will survive to be recognized and enjoyed by a contemporary mass audience.

If Hamlet was now to be viewed as a site of infinite adaptation, a modernist text in process rather than inviolable holy writ, the medium of radio had played a significant role in this new conceptualization. When sound broadcasting first developed across the world in the 1920s, it was regarded primarily as a means to relay and comment on events, performances and subject matter produced by pre-existing cultural institutions such as theatre, publishing and the cinema. However, radio practitioners almost immediately began to explore the possibilities for original sound-based art forms and genres, in ways that often aligned it with modernist ethics and aesthetics. Radio held out the promise of a new type of drama, no longer tied to the history and conventions of theatre but capable of evolving its own styles of fluid, intimate dramaturgy and internalized modes of performance to create a ‘stage of the mind’. Shakespeare's appeal to an audience's ‘imaginary forces’ in the opening Chorus speech of Henry V was often invoked as an analogy to support radio's claim to make ‘better pictures’ than theatre. However, there are also specific obstacles that radio adaptation must overcome, notably the need to find aural equivalents, such as sound effects or narration, for visual aspects of the original play, and the avoidance of too many characters in a scene, since radio has only a few means of focalizing a speaker compared with the resources of theatre, film and television. Both of these potential problems, together with the assumption that listeners can only hold concentration for set periods of time, mean that most radio productions of Shakespeare have been radically cut or rearranged, while a variety of techniques such as distance from the microphone, use of echo chambers, multiple studios and ‘radiophonic’ sound effects have been employed to clarify, reinterpret and intensify the aural experience of the plays. In short, radio has been arguably the most adaptive of mediums, one in which the listener subjectively creates the Hamlet that she hears.