4 - Stoppard’s radio and television plays

Summary

If the “first duty of the artist,” as Stoppard proposes in Artist Descending a Staircase, “is to capture the radio station,” the second must be to capture television. Between them, these two domestic media command such giant audiences that they effectively shape modern taste. Playwrights cannot, in good conscience, let media so powerful escape them. Yet what constitutes their “capture” is not easy to say. Have radio and television been captured for drama when they broadcast a play that is suited to the stage; or have they merely been borrowed for alien purposes? Is radio, in particular, hospitable to drama; or does its invisible stage create impediments that playwrights may disguise, but not really transcend? Does television, for its part, have a nature of its own, with which drama may comport; or is it nothing but cinema at a double disadvantage: bright room, small screen? Vexing questions, every one, for a playwright like Stoppard, who has captured the theatre through impeccable stagecraft - that is, by treating the stage as the partner of words in making meaning in the theatre. Unless equivalent craft can be exercised in radio and television, Stoppard’s “duty” to capture these behemoths of popular culture would seem wholly uninviting.

So it is that, in writing plays for broadcast, Stoppard probes the very nature of the domestic broadcast media. Seeking always to differentiate radio and television, not only from the theatre but also from each other, he attempts to discover what constitutes a stage on air and on screen, then induces each stage to speak in its own oblique language. The result is that Stoppard makes an elegant case on the radio for the medium’s special expressivity in drama, while on television he pioneers in exploring the expressive dimensions of a medium that has yet to discover its idiom. Stoppard’s work leaves no doubt that radio and television can be captured for drama just as he favors: they can both be enlisted to reflect a play’s point, to enhance it, even sometimes to augment it.