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The Hilda Tablet plays

From 1953 Reed was responsible for a series of "pieces for radio" (as he described them), produced for the BBC by Douglas Cleverdon and broadcast on the Third Programme, which originated in Reed's early researches into the life of Thomas Hardy. Reed eventually came to the conclusion that his projected biography of Hardy would never materialise (although his M.A. thesis for the University of Birmingham was on this subject). In its place - and perhaps to provide a sort of catharsis for himself - he invented his "alter-ego" the scholar, Herbert Reeve.

Reeve (played immaculately by Hugh Burden, and writing/speaking in the first person plural) made his first appearance in A Very Great Man Indeed, an account of Reeve's researches into the life of the novelist Richard Shewin.

I can think of no better introduction to the HT plays than that written by Roger Savage in British Radio Drama (C.U.P., 1981):

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. 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-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.)

Reeve met the "lady musicwriter" or "composeress" Hilda Tablet in the first play and she took over from Shewin as the main interest of the series. Played throughout by Mary O'Farrell, she is a fascinating mélange of composers Elisabeth Lutyens and Dame Ethel Smyth, authoress Naomi Jacob (pictured left) and Benjamin Britten. Yet she is a character in her own right.

From Lutyens she gets her avant-garde musical style ("For God's sake, Elsa, by all means throw yourself at the note, but don't actually hit it" - not in the original script, incidentally) which embraces all the modern trends. These include musique concrète in Hilda's own version as musique concrète renforcée ("reinforced concrete music") based on (amongst other things) the singer Elsa Strauss's zip.

From Dame Ethel, she gets her indomitable feminist spirit battling to have her operas performed. Indeed, one of her operas, Emily Butter, was the subject of a whole feature - including each one of its ten acts. Like Dame Ethel, she is a rather butch lesbian.

Her sexuality also comes from Britten. Indeed, she even has an equivalent of Peter Pears in the soprano Elsa Strauss, star of Emily Butter. Following Britten's lead in Billy Budd (which has an all-male cast and is set on board ship), Hilda's Emily Butter has an all-female cast and is set in...a department store. All female, that is, apart from a "very plain-clothes police lady, Miss Catherine Slot". Miss Slot is sung by a basso profundo and, as stated, is in plain clothes apart from a "neat blue helmet topped with a silver spike". In the opera, the name of Clara Taggart is a reference to Claggart in Britten's opera.

[Mary O'Farrell: a recollection - Henry Reed 4th Jan 1969 - more to follow]

Four of the plays were published by the BBC in 1971. Reed took advantage of the publication to make available the original texts. Most of the cuts which he made in response to pressure from the BBC relating either to taste or timing were small, and it's surprising how much he was able to leave in. Perhaps we were just more innocent in those days. Anyhow, you can read the Foreword to this volume on the Solearabiantree site here.

Please get in touch if you have any memories of the plays, or would like me to send you complementary copies of the broadcasts. Please do not buy copies of my copyright transfers from the MiDor website - you are simply wasting your money.

If you are already a fan of Hilda and her friends, you might like to join the Hilda Tablet Appreciation Society. This is a virtual society, complete with mailing list.

To join the mailing list, click here.

In sequence, the plays are:

A Very Great Man Indeed - first broadcast 7th September 1953

The Private Life of Hilda Tablet - first broadcast 24th May 1954

Emily Butter - first broadcast 14th November 1954

A Hedge, Backwards - first broadcast 29 February 1956

The Primal Scene, As It Were... - first broadcast 11th March 1958

Not a Drum Was Heard - first broadcast 6th May 1959

Musique Discrète - first broadcast 27th October 1959

And finally...the text of a newspaper interview with Dame Hilda which appeared in The Times on 15th August 1960.