The Private Life Of Hilda Tablet By Henry Reed 24.5.54

These plays of 1947 to 1955 form a group, which is overlapped in time by another and seemingly very different group of pieces written between 1951 and 1959: A By-Election in the Nineties, A Very Great Man Indeed, The Private Life of Hilda Tablet, Emily Butter, A Hedge, Backwards, The Primal Scene, As It Were..., Not A Drum Was Heard, and Musique Discrète. A By-Election in the Nineties, a study of Realpolitik in Victorian Wessex, has an impish mood in common with the others, but is set apart from them by its period. The others, from a Very Great Man Indeed to Musique Discrète, form a cycle — dramatic roman fleuve cum highbrow soap opera — although they were not at first planned as such. 12 The cycle is set in the 1950s, presupposes a great late-lamented novelist Richard Shewin (rhyming with 'go in'), and presents the circle of his surviving friends and relations. The relations comprise a widowed sister-in-law Nancy (mother to a large brood of pop-musical sons and one Scrutiny-reading daughter), a hugely self-pitying and Freud-fancying brother Stephen, Stephen's cat-
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fixated wife Connie, and Connie's brother and sister: the dotty, bell-fixated General Arthur Gland and Miss Alice Gland (who practises creative sleep). The friends range from the demi-mondaine to the very blue-blooded, but the most formidable of them is the composer Hilda Tablet, who has a memorable circle of her own, Viennese soprano companion (manic-depressive and food-fixated), very gay young secretary, tame music critic, rather less tame librettist, lachrymose Greek multi-millionaire patron, and so on. Into this singular world comes the earnest scholar Herbert Reeve, prim, proper, and very wet behind the ears; and to the extent that the series of plays has a plot at all, Reeve is at the centre of it. He has plans to write Richard Shewin's biography; but he is soon hijacked into undertaking a twelve-volume life of Hilda Tablet. He is released from this in the long run, however (while he and most of the friends and relations are enjoying a Mediterranean cruise on the millionaire's yacht), by Miss Tablet's giving the task to General Gland. En route to this happy outcome, and to Herbert's engagement to Nancy Shewin's daughter (who has by now deserted Dr Leavis for Melanie Klein), we are present at the premières of two masterworks: Miss Tablet's all-female opera Emily Butter and a posthumous play by Richard Shewin which seems to be cousin to E. M. Forster's Maurice and which has to be drastically rewritten before it is made safe for the Shaftesbury Avenue of the 1950s. Then, as epilogues to the plot proper, the BBC itself is shown interviewing General Gland in an attempt to secure his war memoirs and mounting a request programme of the music of Miss Tablet, by now Dame Hilda. (Her music, and the pop-songs of Owen Shewin, were pastiched for the series by Donald Swann.)

Sources:

Savage, Roger. "The Radio Plays of Henry Reed." In British Radio Drama, edited by John Drakakis. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1981. 158-190, 247-248, 273-276.

http://www.solearabiantree.net/namingofparts/radioplays.php