The Wednesday Play (1964-70, or 1965-70) was a landmark BBC drama series, following ITV’s lead with Armchair Theatre (ABC & Thames, 1956-74) in amplifying working-class voices. Canadian migrant Sydney Newman, from a working-class background, spearheaded both initiatives. After completing a Ph.D. on The Wednesday Play’s successor, Play for Today (BBC1, 1970-84), I feel it’s time to grapple with the legacy of its predecessor in greater depth.
This series of posts commemorates the sixtieth anniversary of The Wednesday Play while exploring its diverse output beyond justly celebrated works like Up the Junction (1965) and Cathy Come Home (1966). I plan to watch and reflect on all existing plays up to Cathy, supported by research. Missing plays will still be covered, but without full textual analysis.
01.04: The Big Breaker (BBC One, Wednesday 18 November 1964) 9:25 – 10:55pm
Directed by Charles Jarrott; Written by Alun Richards (adapted from radio play – 1963); Produced by Peter Luke; Designed by Eileen Diss
We must make our private nightmares public.
Well, there are too many lies. Too many jokes. Too much cosiness. Too many cowards wanting to forget and fools to encourage them in high places.
Elvet (Nigel Stock)
This play concerns corrupt Councillor Wally Cross (Rupert Davies) in a South Wales valleys town, who is the self-styled character that gives the play its title. He makes romantic advances on his nephew Elvet’s (Nigel Stock) wife, Sybil (Daphne Slater). These older generations of the family are juxtaposed with young couple Josie (Meg Wynn Owen) and Nigel (Leonard Cracknell).
The play’s opening is textbook British New Wave. Industry indicated through a pit wheel. A young couple looking out over an entrenched townscape full of largely uniform housing stock. Chapel, steam trains… A sense of possibility and hope in the future, which may involve social mobility through moving out of places like this. “Unlike the Southern counties, we’ve got very long memories down here” concisely summarises the non-metropolitan attachment to history and traditions.
Mrs Cross (Daphne Slater) is a crisp RP combatant. She’s on the ball with noting how marshalling statistics was the new form of UK politics – clearly, referring to the ascendant Harold Wilson here. Dreams and ideals going to routine day to day administration. Changing the social order and making a new world and new people – he regrets that this was not achieved. Or it became too bureaucratic and utilitarian? “We’d got we wanted, but I was nowhere…” is a tellingly individualistic slice of dialogue.
Selfishness, he was never a peasant, but a rough background, easily becomes the capitalist, to paraphrase Lenin’s dictum about peasants becoming capitalists when given land. Wally as the grabbing grasping man who has come up from the “rough” interacting with a refined woman Sybil who can get on her “high horse”. It is clearly Lawrentian but also resembles a less histrionic antecedent of Bernard Hill and Frances de la Tour’s characters in Roy Kendall’s PfT Housewives’ Choice (1976). This feels less contrived than the confrontation in that play and does not involve its violence against property. Kendall’s more agitational approach fits the post-1973 oil crisis times, like John Osborne’s play for the National Theatre, Watch It Come Down (1975-76).
The vast, complex and clear two-handed scenes are deftly, unobtrusively directed by Charles Jarrott so that the words and performances are central. You feel like you know Wally and Sybil deeply after an extraordinarily well written and played near-15-minute scene (15:04-29:53).
Jarrott directed 34 plays for Armchair Theatre (1959-69) and then moved into feature-films, and eventually to US TV movies by the 1990s. It’s telling how Elvet, whose knowing cruelty is dissected by Sybil, suggests she takes a sedative. He had just suggested that they get married to help his political ambitions.
This is a great example of a play where you cannot compartmentalise the personal and political, or the private and public. Elvet sees his personal advancement in the public world as more important than domestic routines, love and security. That he’s played by Nigel Stock brings to mind the volatile masculine refusal at the heart of The Prisoner, but this is a Number Six still besotted with power systems, and manoeuvring for advancement within them, yet to challenge them.
Elvet outlines how corrupt the local Councillor Wally is, having taken a bribe for a building contract, so very much anticipating the Poulson Scandal. Elvet has “got him on toast!” due to possessing Wally’s fraudulent gains, leading to Sybil insightfully identifying how Elvet is only happy when he is hurting somebody.
We hear a Edith Piaf English recording of her 1956 song ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’, which Wally puts on the record player in a somewhat self-satisfied and calculated manner. We hear the Searchers’ ‘Don’t Throw Your Love Away’ twice, near the start and end.
Cuckolded Elvet is riled by his uncle’s claim that he is adrift from life, which elicits his monologue to Willie Willis (Edward Evans) about how he throttled a bald-headed Japanese soldier during his Second World War service, which has haunted him ever since. He gives the aforementioned private nightmares public speech.
The final act is ‘One Year On’, with Wally having died three months after he’d gone off with Sybil, and perhaps given her some happiness, but this phase seems to figure as more of an interlude in her marriage to Elvet. At the end, the felled Breaker’s nephew is oddly revitalised by joining a discussion group and taking up carpentry, so that he potentially has lethal tools nearby at all times!
We end with the graver half of the young couple Nigel bemoaning the unusual turn of events, but Josie urges him simply to find humour in everything and not be too hard on the elders. Nigel has switched on a Mantovani orchestral light music tune on the vinyl record player. Pointedly, Josie replaces this with the Hollies’ version of Berry Gordy’s Motown song, ‘Do You Love Me’ (1964). In a fine, upbeat ending, Nige is wise enough to be won over and the couple start an impromptu dancefloor in their suburban home.
The play’s writer Alun Richards, born in Caerphilly in 1929 and raised in Pontypridd, was a naval officer turned probation officer, before becoming a Cardiff schoolteacher. Richards was known for depicting what he saw as unattractive masculine worlds; according to obituarist Dai Smith, ‘In Richards’ work, women are the pre-eminent truthtellers’ (Guardian, 2004). He stands as the first of many Wednesday Play and Play for Today dramatists to have been a teacher, and, like Raymond Williams, an adult education tutor at university.
In an interview, Richards outlined his approach with The Big Breaker. A writer must acquire ‘street empathy’ and be localised and accessible:
I hate most of what I see in the London theatre. I’m against the public being taken in. I’m against cruelty and obscurity. What cruelty there is in my play is placed in a pattern. […] I’m for writing plays on a contemporary theme in a conventional manner.’ (Observer, 25 July 1965, p. 18)
Dai Smith notes how Richards was far from a parochial writer, his focus on Wales containing universal insights. He could
see upwards into a social elite, as well as down. This duality, and its then uncovered existence in the literature of Wales, enormously excited Richards, and was the key to the power with which he flailed the social drift, the cultural illusions and the career hypocrisies of postwar Wales in his two finest pieces of work, the short-story collections Dai Country (1973) and The Former Miss Merthyr Tydfil (1979). (Guardian, 2004 op cit.)
In his excellent biographical entry for Richards, Daryl Leeworthy refers to his novel Home to an Empty House (1973) as a ‘chorus-like masterpiece’.
The Big Breaker was, originally, a radio play broadcast on BBC Home Service on Saturday 30 September 1963 at 8:30pm, lasting 90 minutes, pretty much the same as the later TV version.
The TV play was recorded in May 1964, and mainly appears to have been multi camera studio, but does have a fair few bookending filmed inserts. Like most other plays I’ve discussed so far, there are is a central star figure who may have drawn the average viewer: following Williams, Fraser and Pinter here is Rupert Davies, part of Davies’s conscious desire to avoid typecasting as Maigret (Daily Mail, 6 January 1965, p.5). He had even appeared on Harry Worth’s comedy programme on 17 November.
Interviewed in the Daily Mirror, Davies extols the qualities of his Wednesday Play part as Wally Cross:
This is a potent play and Wally is very much a character of which Maigret would disapprove. Yet some people, like me, will admire the man’s honesty and frankness, even though they hate what he does.
(18 November 1964, p. 18)
There was a subsequent stage version at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry which opened on 27 July 1965. Benedict Anderson largely liked it. Joseph O’Conor was Wally, Gwen Cherrell was Sybil and Clive Swift ‘makes a good deal of the nephew [Elvet]. He has a way of pronouncing consonants as if he was plucking suction pads off the wall, and the sound adds to the general picture of tortured fanaticism.’ (Guardian, 28 July 1965, p. 7)
Rating: *** 1/2 / ****
I really enjoyed this. It bursts with the recognisable sort of life people would expect of the Wednesday Play-PfT banner, and represents South Wales in a more complex, full manner than any PfT I can think of, barring perhaps Dennis Potter’s Joe’s Ark (1974). The Big Breaker inaugurates this strand’s preoccupation with raw life, vigour, vitality: life as lived in contemporary Britain.
On first viewing early in my PhD, I picked up on its fatalistic view of society and politics, with Josie’s scorn for political parties and call to laugh at everything very much chiming with the New Left CND ethos (whose more serious side Nigel seems to embody). On this second viewing on Sunday 17 November, I discerned more its skilful, solid dramatic structure, vivid dialogue and wonderful acting.
I appreciated how Elvet is deepened as the play goes on, and the deft realism of the final act, a year on. It’s ultimately about Britain’s long-term emotional unbuttoning: opening up and loosening up. It also takes a mature, nuanced view of Wally, making me think of how T. Dan Smith wasn’t simply corrupt, but also significantly improved housing conditions, modernised Newcastle-upon-Tyne – with the majestic Civic Centre the beacon of this – and improved its Arts sector.
Back to the craft: well, this play reminds me in certain respects of Colin Welland’s Kisses At Fifty (1973) and Arthur Hopcraft’s Wednesday Love (1975) in focusing on characters feeling the ageing process who want to break from their routines, or unfulfilling marriages.
Daphne Slater is so good here
Watching this fascinating, assured mainstream-occupying play from sixty years ago, you feel the ways in which life was clearly far worse than it is now, but also certain ways in which it was better. A sense of life getting better for each generation is palpably present in the deftly drawn Nigel and Josie characters, who, for me, resemble the young couple in Julia Jones’s sublimely understated Still Waters (1972).
We’ve already got the sense of the Wednesday Play’s capacious ethos. This play’s worldly intelligence in a contemporary setting is precisely what Play for Today would reliably provide – in a large variety of gradations.
I’d say this play is quite often beautifully written, and it is always played for all its worth, and it makes me want to seek out more of Alun Richards’s writing, prose and TV alike.
Best Performance: Meg Wynn Owen
Now, this was a tough call.
Daphne Slater is tremendously brittle and steely, reminding me of Celia Johnson. Rupert Davies is a formidable windbag, who does some great barefoot dance moves to an exotic, overseas holiday-signifying piece of music, a sequence rightly extolled by Television Today‘s reviewer. Nigel Stock is layered as Elvet. He appears a contemptible schemer initially but then fully conveys how he is “damaged by the world”, and he isn’t exactly… wrong in exposing Wally’s corruption, even if his own motives aren’t unimpeachable.
However, Meg Wynn Owen just about wins out for me; as Josie, hers is a fiery common sense which comprehensibly demolishes the veneration of ideas above all else. I recalled her playing a largely antithetical role in Upstairs, Downstairs as one of the poshest of the upstairs lot. A character brilliantly written about by Helen Wheatley in Catherine Johnson and Rob Turnock’s edited book, ITV Cultures (2005). Here Owen plays Josie, young adult in a solidly middle-class household, in an upwardly mobile home, but her vivacious Welsh tones bring out Josie’s essential youthfulness.
Best line: “But the gap between what you know and what you don’t do… Amounts to a terrifying amount of cruelty.” (Sybil to Elvet)
Audience size: 7.35 million
Share of overall TV viewing audience: 48.4%
The opposition: BBC2 (Hollywood: The FabulousEra/Curtain of Fear serial – part 4/Newsroom & Weather), ITV (News/The Grafters/Professional Wrestling)
Audience Reaction Index: 68%
Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 43%
No reviews in The Times or The Spectator of any TV at all directly following this broadcast.
Reception: Fairly meagre, edging towards positive reaction from the critics. Audiences liked it more!
Lyn Lockwood found it ‘meaty stuff’, with strong plot and counterplot (Daily Telegraph, 19 November 1964, p. 19) Marjorie Norris is more reserved about the play, quite liking it but feeling too much is spelled out, and there are too many changes of emphases, but she loves the performances of Slater and Stock (TelevisionToday, 26 November 1964, p. 12). Norris admires designer Eileen Diss giving the house a ‘weighty ugliness’ (ibid.). John Russell Taylor notably saw it as the most interesting play of November, highlighting Jarrott’s skill as director and Nigel Stock, but also felt its final act unnecessary and not entirely successful (The Listener, 3 December 1964, p. 915).
Outside London, Leicester Mercury reviewer A.B. interestingly notes a Goronwy Rees introduction to the play, emphasising the play’s avoidance of Stage Welshness, but found it ‘hard to believe’ characters and dialogue (19 November 1964, p. 9). In the Scotsman, Peggie Phillips was rather more positive, liking the acting and a ‘robust’ play, though saw it as ‘a far cry from the exotic standard set by Sartre and the Russian’ (23 November 1964, p. 4)
I don’t have time to fully dissect details from the audience research report yet, but it gained a high RI of 68% Exceeding any for The Wednesday Play so far. A testament to Alun Richards’s conventional and astute craft here, which has a kinship with Alun Owen’s work for Armchair Theatre.
If you worked on or remember watching this play on TV, please email me at thomas.w.may@northumbria.ac.uk as I’m gathering oral history memories and would love to hear from you. 🙂
This is an excellent and enjoyable holiday read, sat here in Tuscany, Italy in the dying days of May 2024. This Oberon book is evidently vital stuff for anyone with the slightest interest in immersing themselves in British theatrical culture from the 1950s to 1980s. Ramsay’s vying tones – emotionally baroque and austerely astringent – make this book’s appearance on a certain bookshelf in Rose Glass’s recent British horror film Saint Maud (2019) seem the inspired piece of set dressing it is.
I find Ramsay’s insights and feelings about drama, the purpose of writing, and her advocacy of talent and work over success and status highly persuasive. She has an awareness that writers and spectators are best when they have feelings about the characters they are witnessing. Plays should not merely be a weekend diversion, but should affect how you feel about life, and how to live it, sometimes imparting profound secrets.
While these words can apply fairly well to cinema and television, it is very clear that Ramsay does not seem as interested in those mediums as in theatre or literature, though clearly most of her clients whose correspondence is included here did notably screen work, especially single TV plays. Her tart dismissal of John Hopkins seems a veiled dig at the domestic ‘enclosed room’ nature of certain TV dramas. Interestingly, nor does she seem to admire client Robert Bolt’s lucrative and even OSCAR winning stabs at film screenplays, feeling that these expansive spectacular epics like Lawrence of Arabia (1962) are also taking Bolt away from the intense and direct human communication of theatre.
Interestingly, while Ramsay’s judgements and interpretations seem largely unerring, her perception of the underlying theme of John Bowen’s Robin Redbreast (1970) is a notable snapshot of strange early 1970s attitudes, in taking Norah’s disturbing impregnation as being an event of necessary pagan vitality.
This book of collected letters from a renowned theatrical agent contains an honest waspishness that reveals much about the temper of the times it documents. She doesn’t often pronounce directly on politics, but when she does, there is an utter steadfast morality in the way she urges Alan Ayckbourn and Donald Howarth to do the right thing and join John Mortimer, Peter Nichols, Alan Plater et al in a cultural boycott of Apartheid South Africa by not permitting productions of their plays there. These letters from 1970-71 nobly reflect Ramsay’s later advice to David Hare in March 1974 to ‘Look OUTWARD, my dear child. Don’t muck about picking at your entrails, and shitting on yourself.’
Colin Chambers does an excellent job in selecting telling and entertaining letters, though given the richness of the archive in the British Library, a scholar like myself wishes this had been at least 300 pages, to incorporate even more. Nonetheless, it’s apt that key figures such as Ayckbourn, Hare, Orton and Bolt do constitute the book’s mainstay. Simon Callow’s foreword is exceptionally controlled: distilling the essence of Ramsay’s extraordinary cultural contribution. Implicitly, when reading, we feel the cavernous sense of cultural loss and the closing down of challenging voices and imaginative possibilities that have arisen with Thatcherite philistinism and the linked Blairite view of the Cultural Industries as primarily businesses. Not that Ramsay is not attentive to the financial imperatives for writers, but she realises that material comfort is often a byproduct which comes later, and is far less important than how art changes our minds and helps us understand life.
As notably, Margaret Ramsay’s high standards in her judgement of scripts that clients send her are grounded in her immersion in the European naturalist and modernist canon – Beckett, Gide, Genet, Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg – and expressed through her absolute commitment to talented playwrights with distinctive, unique voices.
May's Britain... 