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The Private Life of Hilda Tablet

A parenthesis for radio by Henry Reed

Dates | Cast | Text | Audio

Recorded

24th May 1954

First broadcast

BBC Third Programme on 24th May 1954, 7.30 - 8.45 p.m.

Repeats

26th May 1954, 8.45 - 10.00 p.m.

From Radio Times of 24th May 1954:

Mr. Henry Reed, the author of the script, writes: "I am not, of course, the author of this script. The author is my friend Herbert Reeve, but he has not been in much of a shape lately to collect his thoughts, amd I have done it for him. After his earlier work on the late novelist Richard Shewin, which he collected together under the title A Very Great Man Indeed, Mr. Reeve had many requests for further information about other people whom he had chanced on during his researches. He does not think it would be quite fair to any of his kindly informants to gratify this curiosity; but clearly an exception may be made in the case of the gifted composeress Hilda Tablet. Indeed, Mr. Reeve has had little choice in this matter.

20th February 1958, 9.10 - 10.30 p.m.

Revised repeats

The last eleven minutes were re-recorded with slightly amended dialogue on 17th December 1961.

This revised version was broadcast on 27th December 1961, 8.20 - 9.40 p.m., and billed as "sixth broadcast".

"Seventh broadcast" on 7th March 1969

BBC Radio 3 in memory of Henry Reed on 9th June 1987, 7.30 p.m. According to BBC Archives this was recorded on 15th April 1987, produced by "E Chaillet". (Ned Chaillet)

Published text dedicated to the memory of Mary O'Farrell (who died in January 1968)

From A Pilgrim Soul: the life and work of Elisabeth Lutyens, by Meirion and Susie Hughes (London: Michael Joseph: 1989):

One of the most successful radio plays of 1954 was Henry Reed's The Private Life of Hilda Tablet, whose central figure was a twelve-tone woman composer, heavy-drinking and gravel-voiced, given to such expressions as "Look, old cock" delivered in patrician tones, and possessed of  irresistible energy powered by monomania. Within weeks of its broadcast both Liz [Lutyens] and Edward [Clark, her husband] were talking of suing Reed, poet, playwright and Fitzrovian, with whom Liz had worked in 1950 on Canterbury Cathedral. (They had been on reasonably good terms; at some point Liz offered him a script idea entitled 'Balls: the notion of circumference'. [Source: Donald Swann telephone conversation with the authors, 1988])

The Clarks had good reason to suppose that Liz - and particularly the Liz of 1951 - had been the model for Hilda Tablet. In general outline Hilda might have been more obviously resembled Dame Ethel Smyth - in her homosexuality, her bluff rural heartiness, and the endlessness of her projected biography. (Dame Ethel's autobiography ran into many volumes.) And the Tablet opera Emily Butter (whose music was actually written by Donald Swann) drew shamelessly and at length on classical models; if any contemporary target was intended, it was the recently premiered Billy Budd

But the details of her characterisation were abdolutely unmistakeable. Hilda had a father named Sir Eric [Liz's was Sir Edwin Lutyens] and a mother who was forcefully campaigning for proportional representation. In youth she had played the organ in a country church (whose vicar's wife planned eventually to embalm her feet as a relic). She hailed Frescobaldi as a great musical innovator. She had set Schopenhauer (as opposed to Liz, who in 1953 had set Wittgenstein). She talked inexorably of twelve-tone music; Reed, doubtless out of long and painful experience, makes his narrator remark, deadpan, 'Musicians, as the world well knows, are of all artists the most reluctant to discuss their own lovely art.'

Hilda believed in the 'architectonic' in music - 'I have always been mad about architecture.... I learned it years ago, y'know ... the first time I ever realised Purcell' and the Daily Telegraph was held to have described her music as 'thawed architecture'. This was almost certainly a reference to a running joke Liz had with Constant Lambert, who had once said that if, as Goethe maintained, architecture was frozen music, it might be a good idea to melt down one or two of Edwin's banks. Reed could perhaps have picked this up in the pub, alonh with the other fragments of Liz's distinctive and oft-repeated stories.

It is important to know that in Reed's play Hilda is, despite everything, ultimately an endearing figure, even a vulnerable one. 'I sometimes begin to think,' she remarks plaintively, 'that the sort of things some people sometimes say to me are the sort of things you'd hardly think anybody would ever say to anybody.'  But she is undoubtedly ridiculous, and Liz would have minded the ridicule the more for recognising that the play, and the series in which it appeared, was extremely funny - as indeed the court case would surely have been had she been rash ernough to pursue the notion of suing Reed.

Cast

Supported by backstage.bbc.co.uk

© Chris Goddard, 30 October, 2006