OTD in early British television: 3 January 1939
John Wyver writes: the evening of Tuesday 3 January 1939 saw a studio repeat presentation of Denis Johnston‘s contemporary comedy The Moon in the Yellow River, produced for the cameras by the author himself. The satire had been first staged, amidst some controversy, at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in April 1931.
Since Johnston, a former lawyer, had now moved from the BBC Belfast station to AP, he was able to rework for the new medium what The Times called ‘one of the most remarkable plays that has come out of post-War Ireland’ [since the 1922-23 Irish Civil War, that is].
Here’s the synopsis of the drama from the Irish Theatre Institute’s invaluable PlayographyIreland website:
The play is set in 1927 during an attempt by the IRA to destroy a Free State government power plant. The attack fails; nevertheless the plant is then blown up by accident. Along the way the play deals with nation-building, terrorism, war crimes, the rape of the environment, industrialism and globalization, while at the same time it is a deeply personal story of loss, denial and reconciliation.
The title is from Ezra Pound, about a poet grasping at illusory ideals. As the play closes the action turns back from the political to the personal, as the central character discovers a resolution to his nihilism, and the idea that in man’s unhappiness could lie his greatness.
The first run before the cameras was on the afternoon of 28 December 1938, when Johnston assembled a strong cast including Hans Wengraf, better-known later as ‘John’, a former director of Vienna State Theatre and a refugee from the Nazis; the celebrated comic actor Una O’Connor; Irish Players stalwarts Harry Hutchinson and Tony Quinn; and a thirty-year-old Englishman who had been making his name in quota quickies, James Mason. As was the case with all such ‘repeats’ until the mid-1950s, this second presentation was another full ‘live’ run for the whole team.
Thanks to a detailed review by an anonymous writer for The Times (2 January 1939) we can reconstruct how Johnston had re-worked his drama, which for the journalist had been
in effect recreated in terms of the new medium, and one of the most significant changes was the obliteration of the theatre conventions of time and place. The stage sets for Acts I and II were merged into a combined locality and the cameras moved at will in and out of Dobell’s sitting room into the outhouse…
Likewise, events which had to take place in the theatre in the framework of the act were not so circumscribed, and could flow on from scene to scene much as in a novel… Perhaps no modern play has come so near to the spirit of Tchekov’s comedies or has recaptured the atmosphere of Synge’s Playboy of the Western World so happily… The comedies of the situation are so various and so well larded with sardonic humour that the audience is kept in a roar.
Johnston worked for AP for just a year before the war, during which he was a celebrated war correspondent, and returned for a short time afterwards as director of programmes for the Television service. But his months at AP during 1939 are notable for his championing of Irish women writers, including Mary Manning’s comedy Storm Over Wicklow and two plays by Teresa Deevy, In Search of Valour and The King of Spain’s Daughter, and for his development of innovative feature programming for the screen.
Just over a month after The Moon in the Yellow River, Johnston wrote and produced Death at Newtownstewart, a reconstruction of a murder trial from the 1870s. He had mounted this as a radio broadcast eighteen months earlier, but as one critic recognised, ‘[t]he televised version was not quite like anything we have seen before.’ But I think we should return to this in future OTDs, and to Johnston’s other triumph with this new form, The Parnell Commission, dramatising the proceedings of the 1888-89 judicial inquiry.
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