OTD in early British television: 16 March 1938
John Wyver writes: The afternoon of Wednesday 16 March 1938 saw a reprise of Eric Crozier’s production (above), first presented the previous September, of W.B. Yeats’s supernatural drama The Words Upon the Window Pane. The cast was led by Jean Moncrieff and Harcourt Williams, and Joyce Redman played the spirit ‘Lulu’.
In a 2020 article about the stage play, the veteran Guardian critic Michael Billington noted that he would love to see a stage production, which underlines how rarely the drama has been revived since the war, but the television version had five outings between 1937 and 1939. The text can be ‘borrowed’ for reading from archive.org here, and Billington provided a useful synopsis:
The Words Upon the Window-Pane (sic) (1930) is in many ways exceptional: it is Yeats’s only play with a realistic modern setting. Its subject is a seance held by the Dublin Spiritualist Association in rooms once occupied by Jonathan Swift’s Stella. Yeats has much fun at the expense of the visitors – one of whom wants advice about setting up a teashop in Folkestone – but the main concern is to expel an evil spirit who has been haunting past sessions.
One critic was especially enthused by the production:
Best among the offerings of the month I think I liked the Yeats’ play The Words Upon the Window Pane. Mr. Eric Crozier is a producer who knows his medium. His portrayal of a spiritualist seance was sympathetic and effective. He built up atmosphere most ingeniously, and preserved perfect continuity though he never had more than two or three characters on the screen at a time.
The performance of Beatrice Wilson as the medium was a tour de force, Terence de Marney… was well cast for the young undergraduate, and William Devlin made a dramatic impression as the spirit of Swift.
According to Radio Times‘ ‘The Scanner’, ‘Originally it was an experimental production of Eric Crozier when he was a student in the BBC Staff Training School,’ and its success there first led to AP presenting it in September 1937.
It was especially notable for the use of superimposition to conjure up the supernatural entities. The figures of child spirit-guide Lulu and satirist Jonathan Swift merged together ‘until one or the other,’ as a reviewer wrote, ‘struggled through the mists into simple outline. This simple trick of superimposition made for telling realism.’
In a comprehensive study of Yeats’s involvement with radio [subscription needed to Historical Journal for Film, Radio and Television], which briefly considers the productions of his drama for pre-war television, Emilie Morin wrote of Yeats in the early 1930s that he had,
amply demonstrated his support of radio broadcasting by agreeing to receive moderate copyright fees, and by giving to the societies representing his interests a considerable degree of freedom in their dealings with the BBC.
Although there is no trace of Yeats’s personal involvement in archived copyright correspondence, it is clear that Yeats had no wish to hinder any aspects of programming and that he did not want to be consulted about details. This mixture of non-interventionist interest and withdrawal made Yeats an ideal candidate for new developments in experimental television.
Other televised performances followed [in 1938], of The Shadowy Waters… and Deirdre… These forays into television were not dissociated from Yeats’s radio output but followed from radio broadcasts which were sufficiently successful for BBC producers to consider undertaking further work in another medium.
Moreover, a prestigious radio adaptation by Peter Cresswell of The Words Upon the Window Pane followed hard on the first transmission of Crozier’s production. In the words of Emilie Morin again, this
was a significant event in its own right, and was broadcast a month after its televised performance… as part of the BBC’s Second Experimental Hour, designed as a platform for producers to try out new techniques.
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