Copyright by James Roslyn Jesson 2010 The Dissertation Committee for James Roslyn Jesson certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Radio Texts: The Broadcast Drama of Orson Welles, Dylan Thomas, Samuel Beckett, and Tom Stoppard Committee: ___________________________________ Alan Friedman, Supervisor ___________________________________ Elizabeth Cullingford ___________________________________ Michael Kackman ___________________________________ James Loehlin ___________________________________ Elizabeth Richmond-Garza Radio Texts: The Broadcast Drama of Orson Welles, Dylan Thomas, Samuel Beckett, and Tom Stoppard by James Roslyn Jesson, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2010 Acknowledgements I owe many people thanks for their encouragement and support during this project. I could not ask for a more generous and helpful committee. Alan Friedman introduced me to the drama of Samuel Beckett and shaped my understanding of Beckett’s approaches to writing and performance. Early in my graduate career he assured me that I could say something original about Beckett’s radio plays, and his praise for my work encouraged me to expand my focus to other authors’ radio drama. Over six years, Alan has been unfailingly supportive and generous with his time and advice on all matters academic and professional. Like Alan, James Loehlin has been a careful reader who has taught me much about my writing. I was inspired by his teaching in two seminars, and his guidance as the director of my Masters Report shaped my scholarship significantly. Elizabeth Richmond-Garza has always provided provocative feedback and helped me discover prominent themes and important ideas that were initially buried in my writing. Michael Kackman has consistently offered a fresh perspective on my work and patiently provided advice and information about radio and media theory. Elizabeth Cullingford’s encouragement is all the more appreciated because of her exacting and perceptive iv critiques. My classmates at the University of Texas have provided emotional and intellectual support over the past seven years. I am especially grateful to Emily Bloom, Allyson La Borde, Sean McCarthy, and Aaron Zacks for reading drafts of my writing and for sharing their work with me. I particularly appreciate Emily’s collaboration and her generosity in sharing information and books about radio and Irish literature. Thank you also to Lena Khor, Amanda Moulder, and Tim Turner in Austin and Adel Nadji in San Francisco. Finding a home at the Undergraduate Writing Center (UWC) has benefited me immensely, both personally and professionally. I appreciate the dedication and good spirits of everyone at the UWC, and I am particularly grateful to Margaret Syverson, Scott Blackwood, Lisa Leit, Vince Lozano, Michele Solberg, Brian Gatten, Alanna Bitzel, Andrea Saathoff, and Andy Jones. Each of them has made the UWC a fun and rewarding workplace. Thank you to the Lilly Library at Indiana University for a Helm Visiting Fellowship to support researching their Orson Welles Manuscripts collection; to the Harry Ransom Center for a Dissertation Fellowship to explore their Dylan Thomas, Samuel Beckett, and Tom Stoppard collections; and to the English Department and the Office of the President at the University of Texas for a Presidential Excellence Fellowship. Thank you to the Das Gupta family for welcoming me and supporting me in countless ways. v Thank you to my parents, Richard and Paula Jesson, for their love and support of thirty-four years. I owe my interest in literature to them, to their well-stocked library, and to all the nights (and many days) when they read to me. I thank them for taking me to museums, libraries, and plays and for letting me do my own thing. Thank you also to Brian, an inconceivably good brother. My greatest debt is to Priya, whose loyalty, patience, and beauty have sustained me for almost one third of my life. I owe to her support and unwavering belief a far greater proportion of anything I have done in that time. vi Radio Texts: The Broadcast Drama of Orson Welles, Dylan Thomas, Samuel Beckett, and Tom Stoppard Publication No._____________ James Roslyn Jesson, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2010 Supervisor: Alan Friedman Radio drama developed as a genre as new media proliferated and challenged the cultural primacy of print. The methods of production and distribution and the literary genres that developed during the age of print provided models for radio playwrights to follow but also cultural forces for them to challenge. This dissertation considers these dual influences of print on the radio drama of four playwrights: Orson Welles, Dylan Thomas, Samuel Beckett, and Tom Stoppard. Each playwright “remediates” the printed page in radio plays by adapting or evoking the form of various literary texts, including novels (Welles), travel writing (Thomas), diaries and transcribed speech (Beckett), and historical writing (Stoppard). By representing written texts in an electronic, primarily oral medium, these authors examined the status of literary expression in an age of ascendant electronic media. Welles’s The War of the Worlds and Huckleberry Finn, Thomas’s Under Milk Wood and other broadcasts, Beckett’s Rough for Radio II and vii Embers, and Stoppard’s In the Native State highlight defining features of the print tradition and reveal how practices of writing and “reading” changed in the radio environment. These plays suggest that radio prompted writers to reconsider the literary author’s creative role, the text’s stability, and the audience’s interaction with the work. “Radio Texts” ultimately argues, therefore, that radio drama’s significance transcends its place in media history and dramatic criticism; the works I examine also point to radio plays’ important role in authors’ re-evaluation of literary expression in a changing twentieth-century media ecology. viii Table of Contents Introduction: Radio Voice and Radio Text.............................................................1 Radio and the Remediated Text......................................................................5 Radio and the Printed Page.............................................................................8 Radio Plays’ Generic Hybridity....................................................................15 The Radio Texts of Welles, Thomas, Beckett, and Stoppard .......................21 Chapter 1: A Library on the Air: Literary Dramatization and Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre ...........................................................................................29 Mercury Theatre on the Air ..........................................................................38 Welles vs. Campbell: The Text as Performance or Product .........................49 The Author on the Screen: The Magnificent Ambersons .............................61 Chapter 2: Wells and Welles: The War of the Worlds and the Text Under Siege 65 The Remediated Text in “The War of the Worlds” ......................................66 The Broadcast ...............................................................................................68 Welles’s Influence ........................................................................................72 From War to “War”: Adapting Book to Broadcast.......................................78 The Radio Play and Deferred Narration .......................................................89 Chapter 3: Narrative Conflict: Race and Readers in Huckleberry Finn .............103 Background and Plot...................................................................................108 “Mighty proud to meet you, Mr. Welles”...................................................119 “Just one minute, Huck. Did you say, ‘Tom Sawyer’?”.............................124 Chapter 4: Utopian Voices: Dylan Thomas’ Audible Landscapes .....................141 Thomas’s Hybrid National and Cultural Identities.....................................148 Phonographic Radio Features and the Inscribed Oral Landscape ..............158 Voice and Text in Under Milk Wood..........................................................171 Chapter 5: Samuel Beckett’s Radio Anti-Texts..................................................188 Embodied Performance and Transcription: Rough for Radio II.................196 ix “White world. Not a sound”: Oral Improvisation and Texts in Embers.....208 Chapter 6: Radio Paratext: Stoppard’s Footnotes on Colonial History ..............226 Cross-Talk and Connections across Art Forms ..........................................234 Eldon Pike’s Radiophonic Remediation of Historiography........................245 A Final Translation: Radio to Stage............................................................256 Conclusion ..................................................................................................261 Conclusion: Back to the Old Time Radio...........................................................264 Works Cited .........................................................................................................274 Vita .....................................................................................................................293 x Introduction: Radio Voice and Radio Text Discussing his 1991 radio play In the Native State, Tom Stoppard lamented the limitations