In a slight change to the advertised schedule, this evening’s broadcast will be Leon Trotsky’s 1926 Inaugural Address at the First All-Union Congress of the Society of Friends of Radio, read by Claire Chard. 

Here Trotsky ascribes to science – under proletarian rule – a force of national empowerment and unification.  Radio and the nascent field of electro-magnetism are shown, moreover, to constitute assertions of a dialectical materialism, to be anti-metaphysical weapons: “What, indeed, does a “voice from heaven” amount to when there is being broadcast all over the country a voice from the Polytechnical Museum!”

First Published in Volume 21 of the Collected Works of L.D. Trotsky (Moscow State Publishing House. 1927); translated by Leonard Hussey as Radio, Science, Technique and Society, published by New Park Publications Ltd: London, 1974; copied with permission under the terms of the Creative Commons License from the Leon Trotsky Internet Archive (www.marxists.org) 2002.

Inaugural performance of Cast and Figment,  live at Soundfjord and simultaneously at castandfigment.org:

(A Comedy of) Danger

The Radio of the Future – the central tree of our consciousness – will inaugurate new ways to cope with our endless undertakings and will unite all mankind. … The main Radio station, that stronghold of steel, where clouds of wires cluster like strands of hair, will surely be protected by a sign with a skull and crossbones and the familiar word “Danger”, since the least disruption of Radio operations would produce a mental blackout over the entire country, and temporary loss of consciousness. *

The first play written for British radio was Richard Hughes’ Danger (1924), a one-act melodrama set in an unlit and flooding coal mine. As the author later remarked,

Our audience were used to using their eyes; this was a blind man’s world we were introducing them to. In time they would accept its conventions but how would they react on this first occasion? Better make it easy for them, just this once. Something which happens in the dark, for instance, so the characters themselves keep complaining they can’t see. Perhaps we could get the listener to turn out his lights and listen in the dark.**

‘Listen in the dark’ is exactly what the Radio Times advised its readers to do. In an attempt to foreground the ethics of making it ‘easy for them’, of the naturalistic illusion, and in the spirit of a Khlebnikovian ‘flight from the I’, Richard Hughes’ original script has been revised and edited according to contemporaneous Russian formalist theories – themselves a response to Futurist aesthetics – of ostranenie, or defamiliarization.

* Velimir Khlebnikov, The Radio of the Future, 1921
** Richard Hughes, The Birth of Radio Drama, B.B.C. Home Service, 1956

Written by Richard Hughes
Revised by Matthew MacKisack
Performed by Carla Espinoza,  Lauren McCullum and Leo Ashizawa