Cups, Bees, and an Angry Playwright
This is one of those design ideas that you perceive the absolute genius of at your very first glance:
The most recent episode of the ReWork podcast tells the story of how this product came to market.
Speaking of eye-catching design, I am sorely tempted to buy a B-Box:
I have been reading the letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, and the letters involving the composition and production of The Man Born to Be King — her series of radio plays on the life of Jesus, commissioned by the BBC — are fascinating and hilarious. She started out working with the Children’s Hour staff, because the plays were meant to be accessible to young people, but they kept insisting on dumbing her writing down, and then, when she resisted, wanted her to travel from her home in rural Essex to their offices in Bristol to reach an understanding (by which they meant, convince her to do things their way). Her reply:
Dear Mr. McCulloch,
Oh, no, you don’t, my poppet! You won’t get me to do three days of exhausting travel to Bristol in order to argue about my plays with a committee. What goes into the play, and the language in which it is written is the author’s business. If the Management don’t like it, they reject the play, and there is an end of the contract.
If travelling is at all possible, I am ready to meet the Producer and the Actors in rehearsal. Then, if there is any line or speech which, in rehearsal, I can hear to be wrong, or ineffective, or impossible to speak aloud, I will alter it, if I think the objection to it justified. (But if the actor is merely being tiresome, I say, “No, darling, Mother knows best”, and he has to get on with it.) And if the actor puts the accent in the wrong place (as from time to time he inevitably does) I assist him to get it right. And if neither actor nor producer is sure which way a thing is meant to be said, I explain as placidly as possible. And if either of them makes a good suggestion, I listen to it, and adopt it if possible. Anything that has to do with Production I am always prepared to modify – as in the matter of Joseph’s dialect, or the extra lines required to set the scene.
But the business of getting my ideas across, and the writing of the English language, is the affair of the playwright; I will give you my reasons for what I do, but if you do not accept them, I can only say, “Take it or leave it”.
Oh, no you don’t, my poppet! In the end she got her way: the plays were wrested from the control of the Children’s Hour and given to the great Val Gielgud, brother of John and one of the master directors of radio drama. But then the BBC couldn’t make up its mind about how many plays there would be (they commissioned her to write twelve, but then started lowering the number) and how long each would be (they told her 45 minutes each, but then after she had written a couple they revised that to 40). Her reply:
What bothers one is the uncertainty. One tries to plan the plays so that they will each bear a reasonable proportion to the thing as a whole – but what will have happened by the time we get to the Last Supper? Will that find itself suddenly curtailed to half-an-hour? They treat this play-writing game as though it were like reeling off a set of gramophone records. But honestly it’s the most difficult and delicate job I’ve ever struck and at each fresh obstruction one’s heart goes down with a bump, and one’s enthusiasm and interest get sort of sucked out of one. I seem to be always complaining about something, don’t I? I know there’s a war on – but why pick on Christ, if you take my meaning? Can’t somebody else suffer, for a change?
She won those battles too: twelve plays, each at 45 minutes. (You get the feeling that Sayers didn’t lose a lot of professional battles.) The result was a sequence now generally acknowledged as a masterpiece of its genre, though some of the more pious listeners were offended by the plays’ contemporary language. Thus Sayers in one more letter:
They object on principle. “Thou shalt not make graven images” – still less, therefore, allow a wicked actor to “masquerade” (their word) as Our Lord. And you must not allow Christ to speak any words, however harmless and suitable, that are not recorded and prescribed in King James’s Bible, because there is a curse in Revelation against adding anything to “the Book”. And “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain”; and any sort of acting is worse than vain, it is the Scarlet Woman in her worst abandoned guise. Also, acting the Gospel is a thing only done by idolatrous Roman Catholics in the ages of superstition, or by nasty foreigners at Oberammergau; and the whole thing is Popery, and closely connected with the mummery of the Mass. Further, even if you do not take this extreme view of the damnable nature of the whole enterprise, the thing is irreverent. The characters in the Bible are all sacred, and one must not suppose that sacred personages ever used slang or made jokes. Not only Christ, but even His enemies are “Sacred”, because they are in the Bible. One correspondent objected to Herod’s saying to his court, “Keep your mouths shut,” because he did not like to hear such vulgar expressions from anybody “closely connected with Our Lord”.
If by “closely connected with Our Lord” you mean “tried to have him killed, along with all other Jewish baby boys” — then yes, Herod was indeed quite closely connected with Our Lord.
STATUS BOARD
- Work: Complete text of the book in my editors’ hands. Fingers liturgically crossed.
- Music: My current earworm problem: Travis songs. I don't need to wake up with Travis songs in my head every morning. Or any morning, really.
- Reading: See above!
- Food and Drink: Last week my beloved and I had an amazing anniversary meal — our 39th! — at Barley Swine in Austin. If you ever get a chance to eat there you must.