OTD in early British television: 22 March 1938
John Wyver writes: The afternoon of Tuesday 22 March 1938 was graced with the first performance of Dallas Bower’s 75-minute production of Henry IV by Luigi Pirandello. As Wikipedia says, the drama is ‘a study on madness with comic and tragic elements… about a man who believes himself to be Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor.’ Ernest Milton played the ‘king’, with Valerie Hobson taking the role of Frida, his daughter.
Pirandello was the European playwright most frequently performed pre-war at AP. In addition to a new presentation of The Man with the Flower in his Mouth (which Lance Sieveking had staged for the 30-line serviced in 1930, three more Pirandello plays were given, including The Jar and Fruits of Remembrance, as well as Henry IV in this typically ambitious production by Bower.
He mounted the drama in a claustrophobic four-sided set, which can be seen in the photo above, with two cameras mounted directly opposite each other shooting through masked apertures. The sense of space created in this way was read by Wyndham Goldie as ‘curious and dizzying’ and she ascribed it to ‘technical errors.’ As she wrote,
Henry IV began a number of his speeches to characters A,B and C looking forwards and facing them and continued the speeches, still to A, B and C, with his back to them and his face looking over his shoulder into a camera.
Ernest Milton recreated his stage performance in the title role, and gave Wyndham Goldie a further opportunity to worry away at the perennial problem of the specificity of the medium. For her,
Milton’s acting ‘had “theatre” written large over all of it. And it was right for television as it would have been wrong for the cinema. Why? There you have me. But it is a fact. Television can take big stuff. And though television plays, because of close ups and camera angles, will have a quality of their own, they will be nearer to the stage play than to the talkie. For which, though I am no enemy of the cinema, I can only say: “Thank God”.
A critic for the Daily Telegraph choosing to identify themselves only as ‘W.A.D.’ was no kinder:
The art of projecting plays tor television is a very new one. and is at the moment being. carried on under hideous difficulties. The ‘stage’ is extremely small, and neither at its back or its side does it give a consistently clear image. Consequently, the possibility of presenting a story so that it is clear to an audience is only to be achieved by choosing plays which can be put across by strong. bold strokes.
Pirandello’s Henry IV, done yesteerday afternoon. struck me as a most unhappy choice. It took Pirandello all his time, in several verbose acts to get the idea and action of this play clear in the original. The BBC.’s abbreviated version seemed to me to be just a mess.
Knowing the story beforehand. and keeping all my wits about me, I was able to follow what was happening; but I am quite sure that without that previous knowledge I should have been hopelessly befogged.
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