Radio drama
[8] Newspaper accounts of the era report on a number of other drama experiments by America's commercial radio stations: KYW broadcast a season of complete operas from Chicago starting in November 1921.
By early 1923, original dramatic pieces written specially for radio were airing on stations in Cincinnati (When Love Wakens by WLW's Fred Smith),[13][14] Philadelphia (The Secret Wave by Clyde A. Criswell)[15] and Los Angeles (At Home over KHJ).
[16] That same year, WLW (in May) and WGY (in September) sponsored scripting contests, inviting listeners to create original plays to be performed by those stations' dramatic troupes.
[13][17] Listings in The New York Times[18] and other sources for May 1923 reveal at least 20 dramatic offerings were scheduled (including one-acts, excerpts from longer dramas, complete three- and four-act plays, operettas and a Molière adaptation), either as in-studio productions or by remote broadcast from local theaters and opera houses.
Unsung pioneers of the art include: WLW's Fred Smith; Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll (who popularized the dramatic serial); The Eveready Hour creative team (which began with one-act plays but was soon experimenting with hour-long combinations of drama and music on its weekly variety program); the various acting troupes at stations like WLW, WGY, KGO and a number of others, frequently run by women like Helen Schuster Martin and Wilda Wilson Church; early network continuity writers like Henry Fisk Carlton, William Ford Manley and Don Clark; producers and directors like Clarence Menser and Gerald Stopp; and a long list of others who were credited at the time with any number of innovations but who are largely forgotten or undiscussed today.
[21] Another notable early radio drama, one of the first specially written for the medium in the UK, was A Comedy of Danger by Richard Hughes, broadcast by the BBC on January 15, 1924, about a group of people trapped in a Welsh coal mine.
[22] One of the earliest and most influential French radio plays was the prize-winning Marémoto ('Seaquake'), by Gabriel Germinet and Pierre Cusy, which presents a realistic account of a sinking ship before revealing that the characters are actually actors rehearsing for a broadcast.
Translated and broadcast in Germany and England by 1925, the play was originally scheduled by Radio-Paris to air on October 23, 1924, but was instead banned from French radio until 1937 because the government feared that the dramatic SOS messages would be mistaken for genuine distress signals.
By 1930, Tyrone Guthrie had written plays for the BBC like Matrimonial News (which consists entirely of the thoughts of a shopgirl awaiting a blind date) and The Flowers Are Not for You to Pick (which takes place inside the mind of a drowning man).
The climax of Lawrence Holcomb's 1931 NBC play Skyscraper also uses a variation of the technique (so that the listener can hear the final thoughts and relived memories of a man falling to his death from the title building).
For example, in December 1924, actor Paul Robeson, then appearing in a revival of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, performed a scene from the play over New York's WGBS to critical acclaim.
[30] Initially the BBC resisted American-style 'soap opera', but eventually highly popular serials, like Dick Barton, Special Agent (1946–51), Mrs Dale's Diary (1948–69) and The Archers (1950–), were produced.
By the end of the war MacNeice had written well over 60 scripts for the BBC, including Christopher Columbus (1942), which starred Laurence Olivier, The Dark Tower (1946), and a six-part radio adaptation of Goethe's Faust (1949).
In contrast, the BBC Third Programme, destined to become one of the leading cultural and intellectual forces in post-war Britain, specialized in heavier drama (as well as the serious music, talks, and other features which made up its content): long-form productions of both classical and modern/experimental dramatic works sometimes occupied the major part of its output on any given evening.
However, he made his debut as an original playwright with The Dock Brief, starring Michael Hordern as a hapless barrister, first broadcast in 1957 on BBC Third Programme, later televised with the same cast and subsequently presented in a double bill with What Shall We Tell Caroline?
His early successes included radio dramatisations of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, William Golding's Lord of the Flies,[38] and John Wyndham's classic science fiction novel Day of the Triffids.
The first of his radio plays to make his reputation was Mathry Beacon (1956), about a small detachment of men and women still guarding a Top Secret "missile deflector" somewhere in Wales, years after the war has ended.
[42] Among the most famous works created for radio, are Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood (1954), Samuel Beckett's All That Fall (1957), Harold Pinter's A Slight Ache (1959), and Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons (1954).
Other significant adaptations included, dramatised readings of poet David Jones's In Parenthesis in 1946 and The Anathemata in 1953, for the BBC Third Programme,[47] and novelist Wyndham Lewis's The Human Age (1955).
Inspired by The Goon Show, "the four or five crazy guys" of the Firesign Theatre built a large following with their satirical plays on recordings exploring the dramatic possibilities inherent in stereo.
Works by a new generation of dramatists also emerged at this time, notably Yuri Rasovsky, Thomas Lopez of ZBS and the dramatic sketches heard on humorist Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion.
Radio can be a good training ground for beginning drama writers as the words written form a much greater part of the finished product; bad lines cannot be obscured with stagecraft.
Meanwhile, veterans such as the late Yuri Rasovsky (The National Radio Theater of Chicago) and Thomas Lopez (ZBS Foundation) have gained new listeners on cassettes, CDs and downloads.
[3] While there are few academic programs in the United States that offer training in radio drama production, organizations such as the National Audio Theatre Festival teach the craft to new producers.
Podcasts provides an alternative to mainstream television and radio which does not necessarily require a pitching process to be made and distributed (as these aspects of production can be learned by the creator) and which have no restrictions regarding programme length or content.
In this period radio drama, serials and soap operas provided a fertile training ground and a steady source of employment for many actors, and this was particularly important because at this time the Australian theatre scene was in its infancy and opportunities were very limited.
It featured many well-known Australian actresses and actors, ran continuously for 27 years, from 28 February 1949 to 30 September 1976, with a total of 5,795 episodes broadcast, and was at one time the world's longest-running radio serial.
[75] Audio plays based on literature are also popular in Poland, this is how the sound adaptations of George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones, Mario Puzo's The Godfather, Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth or Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead were created.
Created by an act of Parliament in 1936, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) aired radio dramas along with news and British content in Afrikaans and English.
Due to the nature of low-power VHF propagation, the coverage is very limited, the radio station can be heard only in Lat Luang (Bangkok / Samut Prakan area).
