Festival: The Life of Galileo (BBC, 1964)

 

 This article was first published on the (now defunct) University of Reading 'Spaces of Television' blog on 08 February 2014:

 Our ‘Dramatic Spaces: The Imaginative World of the TV Studio’ film season continues at BFI Southbank this afternoon with a screening of ‘The Life of Galileo’, a version of Brecht’s epic history, recorded in Television Centre for the BBC’s Festival series in 1964. Over the course of the season we will be writing short posts about each play shown, and would welcome thoughts and responses from those who attend the screenings.

 Charles Jarrott’s[i] Galileo exuded a confident sense of certainty about what could and could not be achieved in the BBC Television Centre studio, acknowledging that the production was studio-made through the inclusion of cameras and the production gallery in shot, an artistic decision that complicates the view of ‘as live’ studio television as being best suited for an “intimate” form of drama.

 British television of the late 1950s and early 1960s offered both bardic and dramatic forms of narrative for the viewer, bardic storytelling lying mainly in the realm of news and reporting, while television drama (especially the majority made in the studio, rather than on film) progressed in a sequential, ‘dramatic’, manner. The format of television news presented verbal information directly to the viewer through the newsreader’s narration, followed by filmed footage of the events, with an explanatory commentary on voice-over, sometimes followed by a correspondent explaining the significance of events in the studio. This structure allowed the viewer to understand news as occurring backwards and forwards in time, encouraging contemplative and dispassionate consideration through showing events in a temporal context of cause and possible effect rather than exclusively as dramatic occurrences in the present. The growth of television satire during this period also included bardic elements of narrative, such as Cy Grant’s regular ‘topical calypso’ on Tonight (BBC Television, 1957-65) and the use of sketch and monologue in That Was The Week That Was (BBC Television, 1962-3). Viewer response to Jarrott’s production of Galileo was as much conditioned by the conventions of television current affairs coverage as it was by television drama.

 Charles Jarrott’s production of Galileo fulfiled Brecht’s wish for broadcasting that affected the listener (or viewer) through presenting both imaginative insights into the life and scientific investigation of Galileo and a wider, more educative, insight into the running of institutions, culminating with the directorial imposition of footage of nuclear missiles at the end of the play. The production achieved this effect by adopting its form as much from factual and informative forms of television as from exclusively dramatic ones, unlike the one previous Brecht production on BBC Television, Rudolph Cartier’s Mother Courage (World Theatre, 1959), which is always clearly a television play.

 Jarrott’s production is unique among BBC television adaptations of Brecht in not disguising that it is a television programme. This is achieved through bookending the production with ‘documentary’ scenes set in the television studio. The adaptation starts by showing the studio gallery at work, with the opening music shown to be a disc being dubbed over the pictures. The studio floor is then shown to be an artificial place. It is displayed to its full extent; cameras are seen beyond the end of the flats of the scene, microphones above them, and the company milling about waiting for their cues, in costume but clearly not in character. The title placard does not fill the entire screen, but is framed by a boom operator. This presentation of the mechanics of production, in the form of cameras and microphones, makes Galileo a self-reflexive production, made manifest through its self-awareness as a work of art, and therefore a modernist production.

 Although this behind the scenes display is not continued into the actual scenes of the play, it still serves an important function in encouraging the viewer to accept Brechtian dramaturgy and illusion, establishing that the following story will work as a representation, rather than an attempt to imitate the reality of Galileo’s life. The convention of showing the mechanics of studio production surrounding performance had recent precedents in British television, with the satirical series That Was The Week That Was having presented the full extent of the studio with its cameras, microphones, and audience in its live transmissions, providing the domestic viewer with a greater sense of liveness and immediacy.  In particular, this introductory sequence helps to establish the convention of the narrator breaking through the fourth wall. Direct address to camera was an established convention in most forms of television in 1964, but rare and potentially disconcerting in drama. By establishing Galileo as a work of television, through showing the mechanics of the studio, Jarrott turned the figure of the narrator into a convention that the viewer might find acceptable, allowing the technique to be understood in terms of broadcasting, rather than as a theatrical tradition.[ii]

 An example of how the narrator served to mediate between the dramatic scene and the television camera occurs in the transition between Scenes Two and Three. The second scene of Galileo and the Doge is set in the public space of the harbour of Venice in front of a crowd. The final shot of this scene is shown on a television monitor, watched by the narrator, who then turns to the viewer to explain how this meeting affects the story of Galileo. This use of the monitor interprets Galileo’s audience with the Doge as reportage, presented to the viewer as a news item, which the narrator then elucidates to the viewer. Allowing the narrator to view events through a monitor encourages the audience to identify with him as an everyman figure, as he has witnessed events in exactly the same way that the domestic viewer has. The narrator also is integrated into the action by the use of disguises and costumes, adopting the role of a plausible bystander for every scene, by putting on a false moustache in scene four and wearing ecclesiastical robes in scenes with the cardinals. This integration into the worlds of each scene gives credence to the authority of the narrator as a witness to the events which he explains to the viewer, while also adding a sense of theatrical artifice and a comic register of role-playing to his instruction, making him both a part of, and detached from, the events depicted.[iii]

 A sense of the studio as being a space of representation, rather than replication, is followed through in the design of the production, where sets combine naturalistic and obviously artificial features. This convention is established in Scene One, where the placard that gives the title and date of the play then becomes a unit of the wall of Galileo’s home. Throughout the production this motif is continued, with banners forming components of otherwise naturalistic sets. These properties add a sense of the artifice of the performance, as well as serving an instructive purpose in illustrating the wider social world and conditions that affect each individual scene, for example blown up line drawings and woodcuts represent the buildings of the Vatican. This design, which only comprised a fraction of the set in each scene, did not appear jarring to viewers, as the completely artificial landscapes of Mother Courage had in 1959. [iv]

 The production ends with a further interpolation of the world of television on to the world of Galileo, with footage of a rocket and a series of stills of great scientists since Galileo’s time. The disruptive effect of this is different to that of the studio sequence at the beginning of the play. Where the purpose of the first scene appears to be largely aesthetic, establishing the conventions of the drama that will follow, showing the viewer that the play will not be a naturalistic attempt to replicate reality, the imposition of the rocket footage seems much more ideological in intent, forcing the viewer to draw parallels between Galileo and nuclear armament. This is perhaps the closest that this production gets to “Brechtian television” or agitational drama, through presenting the viewer with striking and unheralded juxtaposition. It is significant that this moment occurs after the seventeenth century story of the play had finished, and therefore appears as a coda rather than integrated into the main body of the play, where it would appear more disruptive. This ending of Galileo appears to have been the least popular aspect of Jarrott’s production with some viewers, the BBC’s audience reporting that:

‘The parallel need not have been drawn so obviously at the end’ ‘The play provided a complete set of judgements on morality and expediency without [the need for] added effects’ (BBC WAC VR/64/243)

 However, only a small minority of viewers reported these complaints, with some others considering “that these devices added to the impact of the play and heightened its scientific theme” (BBC WAC VR/64/243).

 The Life of Galileo was one of the most successful and well-received stage adaptations of the 1960s, and was chosen as one of the first BBC1 productions to be repeated on BBC2. Audience research for the production reveals a high level of enthusiasm, the reaction index of 78% far above the 58% recorded for Mother Courage five years earlier (BBC WAC VR/64/243). What is striking about the enthusiasm expressed towards Galileo in this audience research is the combination of intellectual stimulation and emotional engagement that viewers reported. Great approval was expressed towards the most naturalist elements of the production; historical detail and production values were felt to accentuate the story and the acting:

‘Costume plays with a factual background can generally be relied upon to provide good entertainment’ wrote an Architectural Assistant, and this example, it seemed, had been extremely successful in giving ‘reality and life to history’ (…) a production which drew the warmest praise on all counts – settings, costumes, make-up, camera-work – all were ‘quite marvellous’, it seemed, lavishly and imaginatively recreating the very essence of the period, and carrying the action along with such smooth dexterity that attention was firmly riveted from first to last. (BBC WAC VR/64/243)[v]

 The factor that raised the viewers’ approval in acclaiming this production as exceptional was found in Brecht’s dramaturgy, presenting Galileo with a sequence of dramatic dilemmas, and clearly placing them within a wider historical context. Through presenting these dilemmas within the television studio, mediated to the viewer through the contemporary figure of narrator-as-broadcaster, Charles Jarrott’s production gave the pay a particular, medium-specific, sense of immediacy and relevance. Viewers report having found the story of Galileo exceptionally gripping and significant, praising the production for its instructional qualities, and recommending its educational value:

‘It was like being transported back in time, and understanding all the difficulties of Galileo’s struggle against ignorance and power’ (…) The theme too, it was held, had all the elements of a good play – ‘the human struggle, the historical and scientific interest, the religious question and the present-day parallel’ (…) ‘it is such a pleasure to see a play with a real message and meaning’ (BBC WAC VR/64/243)

 Viewers reported a great sense of sympathy and affection towards Galileo, as well as admiration for Leo McKern’s performance, perhaps making him a more empathetic figure than the “untragic hero” of the epic drama suggested by Walter Benjamin:

Galileo was “presented as ‘a humorous, living, breathing, loving, enjoying human being’, who ‘became a real person, not just a name in a science text book’ (…) ‘The irony, the shades of meaning, the subtleties of character, the humanity of the man – so many facets to relish. It was delightful’ (BBC WAC VR/64/243)

 The Life of Galileo works as a fully realised Brechtian production, that not only used the conventions of studio camera movement and vision mixing to explain and illustrate the decisions made by characters and their place within a wider social structure, but also succeeded in placing these characters within a sustained bardic narrative. This bardic storytelling operated through the use of the guiding figure of the narrator, as well as through the integrated use of captions, monitors, sets that were clearly artificial and, in the sequence of nuclear missiles, the use of interpolated non-original footage. The production achieved an original Brechtian form that was unique to television, through not disguising the programme’s means of production: a television studio, with microphones and cameras.

 The undisguised artifice of Jarrott’s production assisted viewers’ ability to follow the story of Galileo and to draw conclusions from it. Encouraged by the confidence that they were being told a story, viewers felt permitted to empathise with the figure of Galileo, whilst being able to place his life within the context of the state of Rome in the seventeenth century. Jarrott’s adaptation managed to achieve this effect by following a model that derived as much from forms of television other than drama, such as news and commentary, an innovation distinct from the more abstract and less broadly social experimental studio tradition established by the Langham Group. This created a model for studio television that encouraged a drama that was ‘dramatic’ in Brechtian terms as opposed to the more realist model that ‘as live’ drama generally used. This rethinking of the studio and how it could be used for television narrative showed unexpected possibilities for taped ‘as live’ drama, capable of engaging and encouraging the curiosity of a broad television audience.

[i] Charles Jarrott (1927-2011), after starting his career as an actor, became one of the most respected and prolific directors of contemporary drama in British television in the 1960s, directing 34 separate Armchair Theatre (ABC/ Thames, 1956-74) productions between 1959 and 1969, as well as some controversial single plays for the BBC such as The Wednesday Play: Cock, Hen and Courting Pit (1966) and Harold Pinter’s Tea Party (1965) and The Basement (1968). Jarrott moved to Hollywood in 1969, winning a Golden Globe for his first film, Anne of the Thousand Days (1969).

[ii]Audience research appears to suggest that the use of a narrator was merely accepted, rather than embraced by Galileo’s otherwise enthusiastic audience (“I like a play to proceed without somebody telling you the story every few minutes”, BBC WAC VR/64/243), although the convention of narrator does appear to have been understood by the audience, rather than seen as confusing.

[iii] This narrative convention had also been recently used in the theatre in the role of ‘The Common Man’ in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, a highly successful and popular play.

[iv] See the BBC Audience Research Report for Mother Courage (BBC WAC VR/59/372)

[v] Such few adverse comments as can be found attack the play on the same terms, treating it as representative of television period costume drama per se: “I am completely at a loss why these plays are produced. I hope the actors got a kick out of it, dressing up like a lot of B.Fs. I endured it for an hour until I could cheerfully had shot the lot” (BBC WAC VR/64/243)

Beyond the Fourth Wall: Experiments in TV Drama: David Bowie in Baal (BBC, 1982)

 

 

 This article was first published on the (now defunct) University of Reading 'Spaces of Television' blog on 02 November 2012:

 Alan Clarke’s television production of Bertolt Brecht’s play Baal (BBC1, 2 March 1982) is being screened as part of the ‘Beyond the Fourth Wall: Experiments in TV Drama’ season at BFI Southbank on Friday 30 November. Booking details can be found here. Billy Smart, author of ‘Brechtian Television: Theatricality and Adaptation of the Stage Play’, considers the unique style and qualities of this production:

The play

 Baal was Brecht’s earliest play, written in 1918 as a student diatribe against Hanns Johst’s expressionist piece The Lonely One. Satirising Johst’s tale of an unacknowledged artist who redeems his dissolute lifestyle and dies at peace with the world, Brecht created in Baal a monster of sensuality and self-gratification, a ribald, drunken strolling player named after a bestial pagan deity. Despite his repulsive appearance and egocentric amorality Baal is irresistible to women, which makes him envied, admired and despised by men. He seduces every girl who comes his way before abandoning them to pregnancy or suicide, and finally murders his best friend, goes on the run and dies alone in a woodcutter’s cottage.

 (Pegg, 2002, pp. 461-2)

The 1982 production

 Because it was made in 1981, the technical opportunities and mode of production available for Baal’s director, Alan Clarke, were more flexible than those used by previous directors of Brecht’s plays for the BBC, Rudolph Cartier (World Theatre: Mother Courage and her Children, 1959) and Charles Jarrott (Festival: The Life of Galileo, 1964). Clarke had the opportunity to re-edit the piece extensively in post-production, as had become customary in the production of studio television drama (Jacobs, 2000, p. 24), an innovation that might encourage the creation of the “Brechtian television” that had been called for by John McGrath, Ken Loach and others in the 1960s. Clarke’s production achieves its Brechtian distancing effect through montage and editing in places, but is also committed to the perceived virtues of ‘as live’ recording, featuring long scenes of continuous performance unfolding. However these long scenes are shot in a completely different way to Charles Jarrott’s intimate directorial style in Galileo, and show how the ‘as live’ studio mode of production could be used to create a mood of objectivity and detachment on the part of the viewer, instead of being used to create empathy.

 The role of Baal required a charismatic performer who could sing, and who was prepared to play an unattractive character. Clarke’s initial preference for the role was Steven Berkoff, but he was persuaded out of the choice because Berkoff would present too unambiguous a sense of social origin for Baal (Kelly, 1998, p. 138). Instead, David Bowie was chosen, whose singing, background in mime[1] and ability to adopt the role of outlandish and outsider characters made him well qualified to fulfil these criteria. Having a major international star in the production undoubtedly changed the circumstances of its marketing and reception, the play being billed as David Bowie in ‘Baal’. This promotion of star over play[2] led to questioning of the BBC’s values in several quarters (Sunday Times review 7 March 1982, quoted in Pegg, 2002 p.463, Gardner and Wyver, 1983, p. 126). Bowie also capitalised on the production by releasing an EP of re-recordings of the five songs featured[3]

 The inclusion of David Bowie altered perceptions of the play, and probably helped to militate against it being seen as a mainstream television production. Although David Bowie was a hugely famous performer by 1981, he was still largely perceived as a cult figure, rather than as a popular entertainer[4] or as a conventional actor, his two major roles previously having been as an extraterrestrial in The Man Who Fell To Earth (dir. Nick Roeg, 1975) and as the deformed Elephant Man on Broadway (1980). This meant that unlike Mother Courage (with Flora Robson) or Galileo (Leo McKern), Baal was a production whose casting worked differently for two different sets of viewers; a pop audience, and a general one.

 Bowie’s participation in the production was due as much to the status of Alan Clarke as to that of the play, Bowie having seen Clarke’s 1979 film version of Scum and responded with enthusiasm (Fenwick, 1982, p. 7). Clarke occupied a difficult position within the hierarchy of the BBC by 1981, as being one of the most prestigious and talented directors working for the Corporation, but also one of the most contentious, this difficult relationship between director and institution having reached a critical point with the decision of Alistair Milne, the BBC’s director General, not to screen Clarke’s original television film of Scum in 1977, ostensibly on the grounds of excessive violence and presenting an exaggerated picture of the failings of the borstal system (Kelly, 1998, 103-5). After this incident, Clarke’s work for television became more uncompromising and nihilistic, culminating in the exceptionally violent and bleak television films of Elephant (BBC2, 1988) and The Firm (BBC2, 1989)

 Clarke’s production can be seen as the second part of a pair of complementary works, following on from his 1978 Play Of The Month BBC1 production of Georg Buchner’s 1835 early modernist play Danton’s Death. Both plays share a similarity of style and theme; written by very young authors, they present a bitter view of human existence as being a struggle to preserve the life force, in Buchner in the dialectic of revolutionary principle that results in Robespierre staying alive at the expense of Danton, and in Brecht, through Baal’s amoral use of others for his own gratification, particularly women. The depiction of this struggle can give both plays a harsh, cold, feel for the viewer, and the two plays are possibly the most scabrous, bleak and cruel theatrical adaptations ever transmitted on BBC1[5].

 Clarke’s production of Danton’s Death accentuates this mood by using the studio of Television Centre One in a way unlike almost any other drama, using design, groupings and camera technique to emphasize its artifice and great scale. The production was shot on long lenses, in a way common in film but rarely used in television, breaking away from the familiar visual grammar of “zoom lenses and it’s all close-ups, mid-shots, one-shots” (Stuart Walker, the production’s designer, in Kelly (ed.), 1998, p. 110). With the use of narrow lenses, the cameras were never closer to the actors than fifteen yards away, changing the nature of performance, and the extent to which it was mediated by the director, with actors less aware of which camera they were performing to, and crew on the studio floor uncertain as to what Clarke was shooting unless they were looking at monitors (Kelly, 1998, p.110). The play’s producer, David Jones, described the effect of this process as achieving “a cool, detached feel” (Kelly, 1998, p. 110)

 This sense of detachment was augmented by the production’s design, which attempted to give definition to the large-scale scenes enacted by the use of bright chiaroscuro lighting, concentrating on whites, greys and blacks, with very little primary colour (often used for tricolour flags), which created a sense of defined and shaded outlines for both performers and sets that recreated the effect of eighteenth century engravings (Kelly, 1998, p. 110). For his production of Baal, Clarke continued to use the methods of direction and design that he had innovated in Danton’s Death.

Play of the Month: Danton’s Death (BBC, 1978)

 The source play Baal has as much dissimilarity of form and structure with Mother Courage and Galileo as it shares with them, especially in the 1918 first draft version (unpublished in English translation[6]) that Clarke chose to use. The play contains a multiplicity of scenes of varying length (unlike the 12 scenes of Mother Courage or the 15 of Galileo). The nineteen year old Brecht created a world which is more defined by a sense of non-realism than his later works, where, although scenes may be parodic or melodramatic in register, they are based around realistic situations of human power relationships (for example, Mother Courage’s bartering or the aged Galileo’s feigning of senility may require levels of theatricality that would be improbable if applied in real life, but the intention of Mother Courage and Galileo in acting in such a manner is established to the audience as being real).

 The story of Baal operates on a much more mythic level than those of Mother Courage and Galileo. While their journeys are defined by the need for money, patronage or safety, Baal’s actions are defined by a more abstract life-spirit. Speirs (1987, p. 18) suggests that the play should be seen as a realisation of the struggle between Eros (life) and Thanatos (death) through the actions and figure of Baal. Baal is much closer to the bardic tradition of epic theatre than Brecht’s later plays in realising this struggle through poetic language that contains a complex series of codes dramatised through imagery, not incident; Baal continually talks of either trees (functioning as symbols of life), rivers (which function as symbols of life’s transience and the force of death) and, especially, the sky (the changing colours of which indicate the ever-changing fortunes and circumstances of life) (Speirs, 1987, p.18, Pegg, 2002, p. 462).

 To realise this poetic sense of life-essence, Baal is a play which is realised through an expressionist realisation of the stage, which is intended to function not as a realistic representation of the world, but as a spiritual or intellectual space, reflecting Baal’s own thoughts and reflections. The play’s rapid sequence of short scenes required a sparse and flexible stage layout, realised in its 1923 Leipzig premiere through the use of a cyclorama (curved backdrop), a design used again by Brecht for Mother Courage. Where the two plays differ is that Mother Courage is a play entirely set in exteriors (battlefields and camps), while Baal is largely set in interiors (dining rooms, attics and inns), leading towards scenes of Baal’s flight and death in the forest. While a theatrical audience are aware of the representative space of the stage, a television audience are more familiar with naturalistic staging, from the great majority of television drama.

 Clarke staged the play by using very large, representative sets shot through narrow lenses for the interior scenes, with entirely non-representative tunnels of gauze for the countryside (Kelly, 1998, p. 138). The juxtaposition between these two settings is less jarring than might be expected, due to the blurred sense of reality in the interior scenes. Speirs suggests that a Baal’s essence is communicated through the imagaristic language of Baal “making the surface of social relationships transparent, revealing the mythical conflict underlying it” (1987, p.18). Clarke’s use of the television studio, and design aesthetic, accentuates this sense of non-realism. The large sets are detailed, highlighting shade and shadow, and convincing, but are also disconcertingly expansive. Baal’s attic is first shown to the viewer[7] in an extensive wide shot that shows it to be on the scale of a warehouse, rather than a garret.

 While this view allows the viewer to take in the scale of detail of such a large space, it also serves to alienate them from the human situation of the characters, dwarfed by their surroundings. Clarke’s long lens shooting of interiors also works to highlight the story’s mythic properties in the first scene, where Baal disrupts a bourgeois party held in his honour by a rich patron, Mech, by seducing his wife. The scale of the dining room allows the viewer to observe the full figurative movements of both Baal and Emilie, and to give the figure of Emilie a great symbolic weight in the composition of the entire scene, by making her pale dress the only point of light in a dingy room.

 The lighting is also made deliberately artificial and theatrical at points in the production, noticeably when  a curtain is opened and the studio lights bounce up, quite deliberately, a second later, or when Baal switches the stage lights off to sing.

 The distancing effect of the near-continual use of long shot is well illustrated by the climax of the scene[8] backstage at ‘The Night Cloud’, the club where Baal has scandalised and excited his audience by performing a salacious song[9] on stage with his lover Sophie. The chaotic and confused reaction to this performance is shown through the room becoming crowded with various nightclub figures (dwarfs, showgirls, drinkers, the club owner, a drug addict) each responding volubly to the event in a series of monologues that express their own concerns. Clarke’s decision to show this scene in long shot discourages the viewer from forming any understanding of the individual motivations of these characters, but to follow the chain of events in the room instead.[10]

 The structure of Baal operates around a more confused chronology than that of Mother Courage or Galileo. Whilst the scenes of Baal’s life are presented chronologically they are broken and framed by the narration of Baal himself, each scene being heralded by a chorus of ‘Baal’s Hymn’, in which Baal refers to himself in the third person, singing in the past tense about the events which the viewer is about to see. This device confuses notions of past and present and their understanding of Baal as a character for the viewer, emphasizing both the intensity of his experiences that are enacted, and his detachment from them as a poet. Each scene is also given a title through a caption (such as “Baal abandons the mother of his unborn child”).

 Advances in studio technology meant that Clarke had opportunities to realise this narrative that would not have been available before the introduction of sophisticated post-production. Few of the songs in Rudolph Cartier’s 1959 production of Mother Courage are used because they would have to be separately recorded and orchestrated in a sound studio and then mimed in an ‘as live’ production, an effect liable to be unconvincing (the two songs which are used being shot in filmed inserts, where shots could be pieced together in the cutting studio). Clarke could record all of the verses of ‘Baal’s Hymn’ in one session, and then interpolate them into the recording of the play. These scenes were recorded of David Bowie against a red background, addressing the viewer directly by looking into camera (the only times that Baal does this in the production), accompanying himself on banjo[11]. Whenever the song is sung, the screen is split into two halves, the other half displaying a picture of the sky or a forest, sometimes overlaid with a caption.

 The split screen effect becomes more prevalent in the later, exterior scenes of the play. With the studio representing a forest through tunnels of gauze, a sense of location is provided only through the dialogue in the live action half on the right of the screen and the symbol on the left. The effect is not dissimilar to the picture behind a newsreader during a bulletin, acting as an aide-memoir to the viewer of where the action is taking place, but the repetition of the same unremarkable pictures means that the poetic imagery in the dialogue has to do most of the work in engaging the viewer’s imaginative powers. A similar effect is achieved during the only other song of the five in the production to be sung by Bowie separately to camera, rather than performed as part of the diegetic action of a scene, ‘The Drowned Girl’, where the right hand side of the screen is filled with a freeze-frame of the face of Johanna (Tracy Childs) underwater.

 The boldest use of postproduction technology occurs in the scenes in the forest, where Baal’s dialogues with his friend Ekhart (Jonathan Kent) are conducted entirely on the march, with the two men performing their dialogue while “repeatedly walking towards the camera, cutting back to the start of an identical shot each time they reach it” (Pegg, 2002, p. 463).

 The effect of this is to concentrate the viewer’s understanding of space and time, making how and where the dialogue is supposed to follow uncertain, and to accentuate the physicality of the act of marching and how the two men respond to each other. This is a form of montage, but one specific to the conditions of a television studio draped with gauze. In a filmic location treatment of the same idea, the background and lighting would be liable to have changed from shot to shot, giving an idea of the men’s progress through the forest space.

 Clarke’s production had the misfortune to be scheduled against another high-profile stage adaptation on ITV, John Mortimer’s A Voyage Round My Father (Thames, 1982), starring Laurence Olivier and Alan Bates. The aesthetic of this production[12] is almost a parallel opposite of Baal, being shot on location on film, telling a linear story through the familiar convention of voice-over, and being reliant upon the star personae and charm of the leads to create a sense of empathy on the part of the viewer. Critics made unfavourable comparisons between the two productions, most emphatically Hilary Kingsley in the Daily Mirror:

 It seems daft to say we had a contest between Lord Olivier, our greatest living actor, and David Bowie, professional weirdo, rock idol and actor on TV last night. (…) Baal was a total flop. I cannot believe even the most besotted of David Bowie’s fans could have tolerated more than a few moments of it. The hero, a tramp-poet haunting German society in 1912, was rotten in every sense – a drunk, a slob, a know-all, a seducer, a murderer, who apparently decomposed before our eyes. That the BBC could spend a small fortune on this repulsive and rightly ignored tableau is a cause for top level concern

(Kingsley, Daily Mirror, 3 March 1982, quoted in Pegg, 2002, p. 463)

 Clarke’s use of the studio and casting had proved effective in creating an alienating and objective understanding of Baal on the part of the viewer, though this uncompromising, highly stylised reading also resulted in a sense of hostility and bafflement towards the play on the part of some viewers and critics.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bowie, David, Baal’s Hymn (EP), RCA (RCA BOW 11), 1982.

Brecht, Bertolt, Plays I, London: Methuen, 1970.

Brunsdon, Charlotte, ‘Problems with Quality’, Screen, 31/1, 1990, pp 67-90.

Fenwick, Henry, ‘The man who fell for Brecht’, Radio Times, 27 February 1982, pp 6-7.

Gardner, C. & Wyver, John, ‘The Single Play: An Afterword’, Screen, 24/4-5, 1983, pp. 125-30.

Kelly, Richard (ed.), Alan Clarke, London: Faber, 1998.

Pegg, Nicholas, The Complete David Bowie, London: Reynolds & Hearn, 2002

Speirs, Ronald, Bertolt Brecht, London: Macmillan, 1987.

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[1] He had recently completed a six month Broadway run of The Elephant Man. Clarke’s preference for long shots and crowded groupings suited a performer with a background in physical theatre.

[2] See, for example, the Radio Times publicity for the play, with Bowie on the cover and accompanying feature ‘The man who fell for Brecht’ (Fenwick, 1982) concentrating on Bowie’s domestic life.

[3] The unmelodic nature of the music meant that this was only a minor hit, reaching number 29 in the singles chart.

[4] This perception changes in 1983, with Bowie’s album Let’s Dance and its attendant singles, which were not associated with the creation of an outlandish persona as previous stages of Bowie’s career had been, and which formed the most commercially successful period of his pop career, attracting a wider audience than previously. Also in 1983, the film Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (dir. Nagisa Oshima, 1983) presented Bowie for the first time in a leading role in a comparatively conventional film.

[5] See BBC WAC R9/152 (VR/78/209) for viewers’ complaints about the coarse and depressing nature of Danton’s Death.

[6] Because of this, where I have referred to scenes, they are taken from Peter Tegel’s translation of the 1922 production (in Brecht, 1970)

[7] In Scene 4(i) of the 1922 version (Brecht, 1970, p. 17)

[8] Scene 7 in the 1922 version (Brecht, 1970, pp 27-9)

[9] Called ‘The Dirty Song’ on the Baal’s Hymn EP (Bowie, 1982)

[10] For an example of adverse viewer reaction to this technique, Joan Bakewell’s review of Danton’s Death in the Times (24 April 1978) suggests that having to watch multiple groupings in shadowy lighting is confusing and hard to follow.

[11] The onscreen music for ‘Baal’s Hymn’ is extremely rudimentary, as Bowie could not play the instrument (Kelly, 1998, p. 138)

[12] A Voyage Round My Father fulfils all of Charlotte Brunsdon’s (1990) signifiers of quality; a literary source, “the best of British acting”, money spent and a clear sense of Englishness that could be exported. Baal fulfils only some of these criteria, and less overtly.