The Man With the Flower in His Mouth
The Man With the Flower in His Mouth is a play by the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello. It is particularly noteworthy for becoming, in 1930, the first piece of television drama ever to be produced anywhere in the world, when a version was screened by the British Broadcasting Corporation as part of their experimental transmissions.
Plot
The play concerns a man who has missed the train he is waiting for, sitting on an outside table at a cafe. Here he meets a man with a fatal illness, who engages him in conversation about his wife, who later turns up at the cafe herself.
1930 television version
The BBC had been experimenting with John Logie Baird's primitive 30-line television technology since the previous year, running test transmissions both from Baird's own premises and from their own radio headquarters at Savoy Hill. In the summer of 1930 it was decided that a drama should be produced as a new test for and demonstration of the medium, and The Man With the Flower in His Mouth was selected for use because of its short length of around half an hour, its limited cast of only three characters and its confined setting.
The production was broadcast live - recording of television programmes was not at the time possible - on the evening of July 14, from a set at the Baird company's headquarters, 133 Long Acre in London. The production starred Earle Grey as 'The Man', Gladys Young as 'The Woman' and Lionel Millard as 'The Customer'. It was directed by the BBC's head of radio drama at the time, Val Gielgud, and produced by Lance Sieveking. The artwork was by C R Nevinson.
Generally regarded as a successful experiment, the production was watched at the time by Ramsay MacDonald, the Prime Minister, with his family from their official residence at 10 Downing Street. Baird had installed one of his prototype 'televisors' here two months previously, so that MacDonald could view the test transmissions he and the BBC were regularly broadcasting.
1967 re-creation
As the 1930 production was transmitted live, no record survives of it in the archives, as the technology to preserve it did not exist. However, in 1967, Bill Elliott, a technician working at Granada Television in Manchester, decided to attempt a re-creation of an extract of the play, using a replica of one of the 30-line Baird Televisiors he had constructed himself, which acted as both camera and monitor.
The 30-line signal was sufficiently low-band for Elliott to be able to record the production onto a stereo audio tape recorder, thus preserving it for posterity. Although Elliott did not re-create the entire play and used amateur student actors in the roles, he did secure the services of the original production's producer, Lance Sieveking. Sieveking not only returned to produce the production in an attempt to assure as much authenticity as possible, but he was also able to provide the original artwork used in the play which was used again, and the very same 78-rpm gramophone record which had provided the music in 1930, which was also re-used.
The 1967 production survives in Elliott's hands, and a small segment was seen in the 1985 Granada documentary series Television, a history of the medium.
See also
