OTD in early British television: 17 January 1938
John Wyver writes: the evening of Monday 17 January 1938 saw the first broadcast (with a repeat on the following Friday afternoon) of Royston Morley‘s hour-long adaptation of John Webster’s Jacobean drama, The Duchess of Malfi. The classical stage actor Catherine Lacey played the Duchess, a year before she made her screen debut as a high-heeled nun in The Lady Vanishes; Stephen Haggard, Antonio; Esmé Percy was Bosola; and a 40-year-old John Laurie took the role of Ferdinand of Aragon. The Black actor Robert Adams had a small and unbilled part as a servant.
We are fortunate to have a detailed response by Grace Wyndham Goldie to this production of Webster’s great early modern drama. Writing for The Listener (2 February 1938), she employed dated and racially derogatory language:
Should television attempt plays like The Duchess of Malfi? Eventually, yes. But now? Consider the production the other night. Here is a scene. Bosola, hired minion of the Duchess’s brother, is about to strangle the Duchess. This being the sixteenth century when murder was nothing if not gentlemanly, he does not soil his hands with the business himself. He has his hired minion, a monstrous negro, to do the deed.
The negro, having no minion, sets to work. The rope is flourished. The Duchess kneels. This is followed by a close-up of Bosola’s face as he watches the execution. And then we sec the Duchess’s corpse, now seemlily disposed in death. Does all this sound like the cinema? Yet there’s a difference. The whole production smacked of the artifice of the theatre and not of the reality of the movies.
The action was cramped. sometimes painfully so, but on the whole the manipulation of characters within the small space was the most skilful I have seen. So far, excellent. Did I, then, enjoy the production? Yes, because something of Webster’s quality came through whenever Bosola (Mr. Esmé Percy) was speaking.
But was the performance as a whole a good one? No, certainly not. The play was so savagely cut that we were left with a melodrama of almost unbelievable crudity in the place of Webster’s rich, violent complicated picture of Renaissance corruption. There was a good deal of ‘fluffing’ of lines and one actor even had to be prompted (with ludicrous effect) by his partner in a close up. And there were unexplained noises which sounded like studio disasters.
Now considering the difficulties it was astonishing that the play should have been done as well as it was. But is it worth doing Webster if he can only be done like this?
The production is also one of the few pre-war dramas to be the focus of a scholarly study, written by Lisa Ward in Screen Plays: Theatre Plays on British Television, edited by Amanda Wrigley and myself for Manchester University Press, published in 2022. As she noted, the BBC Written Archives Centre holds a slim file about the transmission, with set diagrams, production memos, cast lists and a partial camera script.
Lisa Ward pointed out that before this version the most recent English production appears to have been at the Embassy Theatre in 1935, and three of the television cast reprised their roles from that staging, including Laurie. Marie Ney was originally cast for the television production, but she was replaced by Catherine Lacey only a fortnight or so before the first transmission. Ward wrote:
In a configuration typical of prestige productions during this era, Malfi incorporated multiple sets and utilised both of the television studios at Alexandra Palace. Four different set-ups were used in Studio One [the is, studio A]… Studio Two [B] had only two set-ups.
Written captions were used for the production, at a time when spoken titles and character names were the norm. Ward was also able to analyse the adpatation decisions that Morley made in his radical cutting of the text.
The programme’s defining narrative characteristic… is its choice of ending: eliminating the entirety of the revenge plot in act 5 and concluding just moments after the Duchess’s murder… In Webster’s text, the Duchess briefly revives, hearing the news that the tableau of her family’s dead bodies was all a trick.
In the television programme, she dies immediately, never hearing from Bosola that her family yet lives… this version thus offers Bosola no chance at redemption, no opportunity to embrace his role as revenger when the pathos of her final death makes him realise his sins.
Ward also reflected on Wyndham Goldie’s review, recognising it as ‘a keen television viewer’s meditation on the medium’s cultural moment.’
Goldie’s review captures a moment not unlike that which the dramatists of the early modern stage must have experienced: a time when people were making up the rules of their craft as they went, with both successes and failures.
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