Entangled Theatre History and the Ephemerality of Radio: Tracing the BBC's Intermedial Impact on British Postwar Drama (ETHER)

ETHER (Entangled Theatre History and the Ephemerality of Radio) offers the first in-depth study of the relationship between wireless broadcasting and British postwar drama. It analyzes how the writing for theatre by Harold Pinter (1930-2008), Tom Stoppard (1937) and Caryl Churchill (1938) was significantly conditioned by their interactions with BBC radio. ETHER's principal research hypothesis holds that the widely acknowledged innovative nature of their stage plays is to a large but unrecognized extent due to what the project groundbreakingly conceptualizes as radiophonic intermediality. While intermediality is a common phenomenon, typically understood to mean the interchanges between different media that result in a redefinition of one another, the creative exchange between radio and theatre is still very poorly understood. In order to address this lacuna, ETHER analyzes how new characteristics of theatre from this period can be traced back to either general attributes of broadcasting or acoustic genres like radio plays, features, documentaries and comedy shows. These traits include a radically different representation of the human body, the foregrounding of voice, sound and listening, as well as silence together with an impaired visibility, even the use of certain collage techniques. As a final key element of this intermedial cross-pollination between radio and theatre, ETHER factors in adaptation as a major driving force of innovation. This was a widespread practice on the wireless and the stage - in both directions - but has been equally ignored in academic research. To achieve its objectives, ETHER brings together a wide range of disciplines and methodologies that have hitherto been seldom combined, including literary criticism, historiography, theatre/performance and media studies, audionarratology, archival research and manuscript studies. This is necessary to counteract the ephemerality of radio and highlight its profound impact far beyond the medium itself.