The Radio Plays of Duglas Stewart

THE RADIO PLAYS OF DOUGLAS STEWART

Dr. S. RAMASWAMY
Department of English, Bangalore University

Douglas Stewart is a well-known literary figure from Australia. He was born in New Zealand in 1913, studied at Victoria University, Wellington, worked as a journalist and editor, travelled extensively and was awarded Order of the British Empire in 1960. He has achieved distinction as a poet, as a writer of poetic drama, as a short story writer, editor and critic. His collection of short stories “A Girl with Red Hair” was published in 1944, his edition of “Australian Bush Ballads”came out in 1955, “Four Plays” was published in 1958 and “Collected Poems – 1936-­1967” in 1967. Of his four plays, “The Fire on the Snow,” “The Golden Lover”, “Ned Kelly” and “Shipwreck”, the first two are radio plays.

The origins of the radio verse play go to the ’Twenties and early ’Thirties. People who had reservations about verse plays being successful on the stage could easily see their potential for the radio.

“The Fire on the Snow” is a documentary play about the British Antarctic Expedition of 1910. It was first performed in 1941. The source of the play was Scott’s Diary and Apsley Cherry­-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World. The characters in the play are Captain Robert Falcon Scott, leader ofthe expedi­tion, Edward Adrian Wilson, chief of the scientific. staff, Captain Laurence, Lieutenant Bowers and petty officer Evans. In addition to these five characters there is an Announcer. The play is prefaced by a Prologue to be spoken in a different voice from that of the Announcer in the play. It is this emphasis on the “Voice” throughout the play that makes it an admirable radio play. The Announcer in this play not only serves the purpose of the chorus but establishes unerringly the context for the radio broadcasts. The historical information is supplied in the Prologue to the listeners so that they may be able to comprehend the situation­ – “Captain Scott’s Antarctic expedition landed on the Antarctic continent on 4th January 1911. The march to the Pole began from their base camp at Cape Evans on 1st November 1911. The time of the play is from 4th January 1912 when the last supporting party returned to 29th March 1912 when Scott’s diary ceases. After living on the ice for five months, marching eight hundred miles to the Pole and about six hundred miles of the return journey, Scott, Wilson and Bowers perished in their tent…Evans and Oates, the other two members of the Polar party, had died earlier.” The poetry that is easy on the ear, the audio aspect that serves the purpose of the visual through the picturesque descrip­tive verse can be heard in the chorus comment of the Announcer­ –

They have been out on the ice more than a hundred days.
They have marched on the ice for over a thousand miles.
They saw their dream topple and crash like a wave
And waste itself on the bitter shore of the Pole;
They remember Evans, dying with staring eyes;
They suffered from hunger; shortage of fuel at the depots.
Proving that plans could foil, shook them and chilled them.
They withheld their hands but not their grief and horror
When Oates walked out to the storm.
They remember his face.
They remember his form, stumbling beside the sledge.
Struggling and stumbling. It is hard to believe he is dead.

In spite of the apparent matter of factness of the voice of the Announcer, the poetry is not throughout of the same type. Some of the lines are extremely short but charged with a quiet emotional tone­ –

Death is leaping,
And calm escaping,
And the final shaping;
And death is nothing
But stopping breathing.

The poetry that is given to the Captain of the expedition Scott, is distinguished from the kind of poetry that is given to the Announcer. With extraordinary ease, Douglas Stewart lifts the level of poetry to a higher level where it bristles with suggestive powers– ­

If we had a shovel handy, Wilson, I’d ask you
To shovel away the snow that’s inside my head,
That’s where it’s falling now. My brain is a snowdrift.
Somewhere deep down there’s a fire. I can almost see it
Red under masses of snow.

It is at this level that we have to see the relevance of the title of the play – “The Fire on the Snow.” The Announcer in the very first speech of the play refers to the men of the Antarctic expedition as – “these five men struggling /Like dark tough flames on the snow.” The nature of the journey of these adventurous men, in spite of the remarkable understatement of Oates “It’s not a Sunday school picnic, the march we’re going,” is given its full stature when Wilson says – “Endurance may have a meaning /For men in the snow as for saints and martyrs in flames.” The last lines of the play are spoken by Scott­

Two dead men; and a dying man remembering
The burning snow, the crags towering like flame.

It was the great success of the first radio verse play of Douglas Stewart “The Fire on the Snow”which encouraged him to write the second, “The Golden Lover” with which he won the competition for radio verse plays conducted in 1942. “The Golden Lover” was first performed in 1943.

The story of Tawhai and her golden lover Whana of which this play is a free interpretation, is told in James Cowan’s “Faery Folk Tales of the Maori.” “The Fire on the Snow” was realistic – because it is a historical document. “The Golden Lover” is a fantasy. Tawhai was a young Maori woman and Whasna was one of the “people of the mist”, the fairies of Maori legend. This delightful comedy is more than twice as long as the earlier play and is divided into seven scenes. The play again is poetic drama. The tone for the play is set right at the beginning when we are introduced to the heroine of the play Tawhai and her ridiculous husband Ruarangi.

Tawhai:            You gurgled and whistled all night like a boiling spring.

Ruarangi:          I have never snored in my life. I have known myself
For longer than you have, remember.

Tawhai:            I have been your wife
Two years, Ruarangi, and every night you have snored.

Ruarangi:          By immemorial custom I may snore, if I please.

The light bantering tone so suitable to comedy is maintained throughout the play. The simple story of Tawhai, Ruarangi her husband and Whana the “golden lover” is told with classic simplicity and unsullied tenderness and feeling for the simple elo­quence of the naturally gifted unsophisticated people. The poetry that wells forth straight from the heart lends a natural dignity to the homely utterance of these children of nature. The “Man of the mist” – Whana, the golden lover, gives expression to his love of Tawhai in the following lines:

When the tui sings,
The bell through the green of the forest, clear and deep,
Some form arises trembling among the music
Like a silver ghost, my darling. You are the ghost.
When the Kowhai breaks into flower and the honied blossoms
Flow down to the earth in a waterfall still and silent
Some form that is not a tree laughs there and sings
And bathes her hair and her hands in the golden pool:
Your hair and your hands, your heart of the spring and its flowers.
A green spirit in the forest, a dark in the earth,
A fire of silver burning now with the stars­–
Tawhai, Tawhai, you are all the earth and heavens.

It is this spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling expressed in musical poetry that simply sings its way into the hearts of the listeners like the tui’s song that makes this radio play an extremely enjoyable audio experience. Even the ordinarily dull Ruarangi is stirred by vague intimations of Beauty when he realises, what an enchanting creature he has for a wife– ­

In my folly I forgot that her hands that grubbed in the field
Were a dance of light like sunlight moving through water.
In my blindness I did not see that her curling hair
That took the steam of the pot was a dark river
All down the rapid of her ; in my sleep and deafness
I did not know that her voice was a well of water
Sweeter than the singing river in the gloom of my whare.

Tawhai chooses to stay where she belongs, with her husband and with the other Maories, rather than go away with her golden lover. More than ever before she realises that “we are such stuff as dreams are made on” and she says­–

Never will I forget this man of the mist
Who struck at my heart like a golden hawk from the sky.
to which she gets the reply­ –
Aye, cherish your dream. It is true while it lasts.

The whole play “The Golden Lover” has a dreamlike etherial quality about it which has a hold on our hearts, almost surrepti­tiously working from within and suddenly breaking in on our con­ciousness so that we too will cherish this dream of a play.

Plays which are panoramic in scope where the voice of the speaker could give a verbal picture so that this incentive to imagi­nation could work most effectively on the mind of the listener, are especially suited for the radio broadcasts. The sheer vastness, chill and white wilderness of the Antarctic and the magnificent natural scenery and the ethereal fairy tale atmosphere are immensely suitable to be dealt with through the medium of the radio play and thus we have “The Fire on the Snow” and “The Golden Lover” by Douglas Stewart.