OTD in early British television: 26 March 1939
John Wyver writes: The Sunday evening play on 26 March 1939 was a production by Desmond Davis of Oliver Goldsmith’s eighteenth-century comedy She Stoops to Conquer. Morris Harvey and Renée le Vaux played Mr and Mrs Hardcastle, with James Hayter as Toby Lumpkin and Eric Portman as Young Marlow.
Three weeks later, with almost the same cast, Davis put on a modern adaptation of the play, re-written in the language of the 1930s by Giles Playfair, under the title A Night at the Hardcastles. Now a drama in modern dress with motor-cars, cocktails and cigarettes, this was based on a film treatment by Playfair’s father, the late Sir Nigel Playfair.
After the second production, the critic for The Times wrote:
What added a piquant interest to the performance was that the same cast – with the important exception of the heroine (Miss Hardcastle, played by Marjorie Lane in the Goldsmith version, and by Celia Johnson in the update) – had appeared in the original play on the television screen a fortnight ago…
When it came to… the affair of the jewels we were on rocky grlound, for people simply don’t behave so nowadays, and the bare bones of the plot lay open to view. The two young girls also had a hard task to make their actions seem credible, for a marriage portion does not now play the part it did in those days, nor are class distinctions so rigidly defined…
It was an interestring experiment, well carried out, but there can be no doubt which play was the more enjoyable. Had Goldsmith not written English which is a joy to the ear and the heart, would not she stoops to Conquer have been forgotten long ago?
The two productions indicated the ambition and range of the drama output just two and a half years on from the start of the Alexandra Palace service, and in the summer, ‘E.H.R.’ in The Observer offered this encomium:
Alexandra Palace is coming to the end of its third year of vigorous life as the world leader in a new art. Those who have watched its efforts from the very first have seen tentative and almost apologetic experimenting replaced by the sure touch which comes of knowledge. Nowhere has genius found a better field for the exploiting of the new medium than in the presentation of the drama in all its aspects.
Header image: ‘A literary party at Sir Joshua Reynolds’s’ by D. George Thompson, with Goldsmith the figure on the right, published by Owen Bailey, after James William Edmund Doyle, stipple and line engraving, published 1 October 1851; NPG D14518© National Portrait Gallery, London.
Leave a Reply