In the early 1920s, the British Broadcasting Company, forerunner of today’s corporation, is smugly enjoying its monopoly of the airwaves. Not everyone, though, is happy. Lady Hartley’s firm produces wireless sets. Sales are slow: the “stuck-up idiots” at the BBC are churning out classical music. “Palestrina!” Who will buy radios to listen to “rubbish like that”? Lady Hartley (Angela Bain – feisty to the max) thwacks her umbrella on the desk of the organisation’s unfortunate representative, Cedric Maud (Perry Moore) – Oxbridge-entitled but middle-manager uncertain. Manufacturers, she declares, want something new.
A Leap in the Dark is a comic commemoration of that “something new”: the first radio drama. It’s the brainwave of Maud’s assistant, Grace Gumby (Alyce Liburd), combating sexist discrimination with wit and grace. As director, she proposes Nigel Playfair (Andrew Pollard, in fine actor-manager style), whose Ibsen with oil drums has been such a success at the Lyric Hammersmith; as writer, she suggests the young, idealistic Richard Hughes (Ben Norris) – wild-haired, passionate, intractable.
History is fleshed out with histrionic spoofs: of Noël Coward (Playfair and his retired actor wife – Suzanne Ahmet, deliciously over the top); of Beckett-style absurdism (characters trapped in a rat-infested basement – the BBC’s new “studio”); with a nod to Victoria Wood (Bain’s cleaning lady, improvising sound effects with potatoes and kipper).
Commissioned by Radio 4, aired in 2022 and still on BBC Sounds, this play has been adapted for the stage by its author, Ron Hutchinson, with his writing partner, Alisa Taylor. Director Caroline Wilkes and her excellent cast deliver comic punches with swaggering panache (not only the leads but also multiple role-playing Rob Pickavance and Madeleine Leslay, known to Archers’ fans as the forthright Chelsea Horrobin). The laugh-aloud production, though, cannot hide the fact that, expanded from one hour to two, the text feels overblown, filling time rather than satisfying dramatic needs.
Negatives aside, it’s still well worth seeing – not least for the culminating “re-enactment” of that first live broadcast, featuring Welsh miners trapped in darkness after an explosion (anticipating immersive productions, the announcer suggests listeners might wish to dim or extinguish lights at home). It’s imaginative, hilarious and surprisingly moving.
