Simon Cooke
Aickman’s
“strange stories” could hardly be described as the sort of material that lends
itself to a visual adaptation. It is difficult to envisage a stage version of
any of his texts, and although there have been several television treatments of
his work – notably Jeremy Dyson’s recent adaptation The Cicerones (2013) – the complexity of the writing, with its
strange imagery, unresolved narratives and menacing tone is resistant to
dramatization in the conventional sense of the term. It would be interesting to
see how the director approached the television version of “Ringing the
Changes”, re-titled The Bells of Hell,
which was broadcast by BBC2 in the United Kingdom in 1968. Shot on colour
videotape and featuring well-known actors of the time, it was deleted after its
commercial potential had been exhausted [1].
Aickman
may have seen this treatment, although it is improbable that he would have
approved. Innately conservative, his attitude to television was either
dismissive, or suspicious of its social implications as an instrument of
control. In “Magnificence, Elegance and Charm” he notes that “every time you take a television
into your house … you bring 1984 nearer” (The Strangers, 222).
And in “The Swords” he refers to “the telly” (Cold Hand in Mine, 3), a pejorative contraction reflecting
his negative view of the mass audience. He was probably more comfortable with
the radio, the familiar medium of his age. He gave several interviews on the
wireless and wrote at least one short story for the air-waves, “The Fully
Conducted Tour” (The Strangers,
107–114), which was broadcast by the BBC on Radio 4 in 1976.
Again, no
recording of the performance is available and probably no longer exists, but
two radio versions of “Ringing the Changes” were made and preserved. One, part
of the Nightfall series, was
broadcast on Halloween 1980 by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation based in
Toronto. Another, broadcast by the BBC on Halloween 2000, appeared exactly twenty years after the
first. Referenced to the date on which the story is set and adapted,
respectively, by P. Norman Cherrie and Jeremy Dyson and Mark Gatiss [2], who
also produced The Cicerones, these
treatments are short (half-hour) programmes. Several times repeated, they are
now available on the internet. While the television version has disappeared, we
are compensated with these two adaptations, which give intriguing evidence of
how Aickman’s work might be adapted for an electronic medium.
Their
principal value lies in their inventiveness. They preserve the terrifying
essentials of Aickman’s text while creating two distinct interpretations in
which the writers modify some elements, suppress others, add new information
and generally enhance and enrich our understanding of the source material, by
pointing to its unresolved complexities. In the following sections we will
examine these unusual broadcasts, the contexts in which they operated and the
key questions related to the problems of adaptation.
Adapting the text for CBC and BBC:
working with sound and structure
As noted
above, “Ringing the Changes” is difficult material, and it is hard to imagine
how it would transfer to the screen. Its combination of psychological drama and
the horrific effects of the danse macabre
would always be problematic, posing the question of how exactly to show the events. When it comes to radio,
on the other hand, other issues are at work and in making the adaptation the
writers and producers must have asked a series of questions which probe a
crucial consideration: will it transfer to the medium of the radio?
Foremost
among these is the question of radio’s “blindness” and its capacity to depict a
story containing visual information and enacted as a dramatic interaction of
characters, settings and situations. “Ringing the Changes” features many
descriptive passages and, like all of Aickman’s work, has a journalistic
surface. We “see” Hilda’s “ridged” face painted with make-up (“Ringing”, 43)
and the kitsch contents of The Bell, where the worn-out register and comically
inappropriate antiques are solemnly catalogued. None of this can be shown. At the same time, none of it is purely
visual in the way that, for example, Dickens’s characters have to be seen. Yet
this apparent limitation is in many ways liberating, opening up a field of
possibilities. Released from the need to represent visually, the adaptations of
Aickman’s text are free to re-figure the material in terms which purely exist
in the imagination. It might be a problem to create the visual image of a mob
of dancing corpses, but it is possible to implant or evoke the idea of the
scene through other means. As Vincent McInerey observes, a skilful adaptation
equipped only with words and sounds can elide the text’s visuality, filling the
medium’s “darkness” with implication as it works to “produce an image, or set
of images, in the mind of the listener.” (2)
This is
precisely what happens in the two versions of “Ringing the Changes”. Both sets
of writers evoke “mind-visible” images (8) and both amplify, rather than
diminish the text’s effects by empowering the listener to construct the scene
for his or herself. Though populated with his strange iconography of familiar
objects, uncannily half-skewed and somehow menacing, Aickman noticeably
occludes the vital information. For example, we never see the dead in any
detail, nor do we see Phyrnne dancing. Working with these weighted omissions,
each broadcast opens a space in which the horror can take a very personal form
(Crook, 7). The darkness of the radio texts in this sense re-invokes the
personal interpretation that takes place when a reader engages with the
original words, asserting psychological ownership of its narrative and allowing
the spoken parts to seem like an internal voice.
Each
listener is thus encouraged to construct his or her own version of the text,
conflating the experience of reading and listening. Of course, the same could
be said of any skillful adaptation, but in the case of “Ringing the Changes” the
transfer from page to sound is efficiently achieved. Cherrie, an experienced
writer, went on to adapt other material in the Nightfall series, and both Dyson and Gatiss worked on the radio
before they presented material on the television. However, they were able to
achieve these effects because the text
itself is what Adam Golanski describes as “perfect for radio” (“As Dark
Locks In”) and Richard Hand as “ideal material” (155) for the airways. Though
incorporating visual imagery and informed with a strong sense of seedy reality
in the manner of British “New Wave” films of the early sixties, “Ringing the
Changes” practically begs to be heard. It is impossible to know if Aickman
wrote it with a sense of its broadcast possibilities, but it is certainly constructed
in a manner which facilitates adaptation. Its use of sound, its emphasis on a
central relationship and its dramatic construction are lucidly realized, and
each of these ingredients can be refigured in aural terms.
A key
constituent in the text’s transfer to radio is the tightness of its structure.
Short stories are generally the best material for broadcast in the form of a 30
minute programme (McInerey, 55) and “Ringing the Changes” is constructed as a
classic piece of condensed story-telling, with limited information and the type
of small cast that fits neatly within the constraints of a short slot. Sharp,
terse and overwhelmingly urgent, its dramatic form enshrines the Aristotelian
unities of time (from the afternoon of 31 October to early the next morning),
place (Holihaven, with a short preliminary sequence on the train), and action
(the Bansteads’ encounter with the townsfolk, both dead and living). This
cogent organization empowers the radio writers to encapsulate its essentials in
the form of a compressed dramatization, conveying the text’s work in a single,
rapidly consumed unit which maintains its original focus.
The tale’s
limited action and characterization are particularly useful as a means of
building the “intimacy” that McInerey regards as one of the defining features
of the radio play (55) and helps to make it intelligible as it is consumed
(usually, but not exclusively) in domestic spaces. “Ringing the Changes” is
especially effective in these terms because the central focus is on the
relationship of newly-weds, mismatched though they may be, seemingly like
figures of Age and Youth and with a huge generational distance between them.
But their conversations are nevertheless ideal material for the all-listening
ear of the domestic consumer who would have heard the plays in leisure time,
late in the evening. Aickman dramatizes their relationship in the form of
highly-nuanced dialogue, and the radio writers preserve most of their
conversations, enabling the listener to enter into their most private
exchanges. As in reading the text, most of what we need to know about the
couple and the complicated dynamics of their marriage are condensed into
rapid-fire exchanges, and the same could be said of the listener’s engagement
with Shotcroft, Don and Hilda, whose inner lives are enshrined in their spoken
dialogue. We listen in to their conversations and construct our understandings
as they speak. The process is rather like hearing a secret: space is eliminated
and listeners are immersed in the story as vividly as if they were overhearing
confidential information.
This
effect is heightened in order to create an emotional bond with Gerald, who
suffers most and acts as the intermediary between the normal and strange. In
the case of Cherrie’s version the third-person framing spoken as the prologue
is changed into a first person narrative, engaging the reader in what seems
like Gerald’s horrified confession after the event. And in Gatiss and Dyson’s
the opening lines are preserved as a grim introduction. These changes
strengthen the identification between the listener and the character and
intensify the sense of deeply-felt experience. Spoken information more
generally allows the radio adapters to build a clear sense of the characters’
personalities, casting the parts (as we shall see) with actors whose voices
interpret the “detailed, witty characterizations” (Hand, 155) inscribed in the
original text.
Spoken
dialogue is thus deployed as the mainstay of the radio adaptations. Aickman
draws the reader into a deadly nexus of intimacy, and the radio dramatists do
the same. The dialogue also provides an
opportunity for the broadcasters to inflect the material, manipulating the way
the words are spoken to bring to the foreground aspects of the characters and
their situations. Both plays noticeably dwell on differences between the
protagonists’ age. Gerald is spoken in both versions by an older man, while
Phrynne is “twenty-four years younger” (“Ringing”, 38) and has a voice which in
Cherrie’s version sounds girlish. Their conversations are well played, acted
with close attention to detail by a range of outstanding and versatile actors.
Douglas Campbell and Nicky Guadagni act the parts in the Canadian version with
perfect, understated English voices, and George Baker and Fiona Allen, prime
practitioners of “cut-glass” precision, in the broadcast for the BBC. The
nuances of the lovers’ interactions are subtly conveyed, and the female
performers are especially effective in bringing out the sexual undertones of
Phynne’s apparently casual comments. Her final arousal is powerfully performed
in both pieces and leave the listener with a lasting sense of unrest and
puzzlement.
The radio
versions are equally faithful to the original material in bringing out the
nuances of class and power. Though Aickman never spells it out, the main
characters’ bourgeois status is accentuated on the radio, with Gerald, Phrynne
and the Commandant speaking in British “RP” or “Received Pronunciation”
accents, the discourse of the educated and privileged. The “thick bucolic
accent” (72) of the railwaymen and the Pascoes’ “common” idiom are similarly
conveyed (with one or two inaccuracies in the Canadian version), and in both
plays there is a clear sense of class distinction. Darryl Jones has noted how
“Ringing the Changes” has “a real sociological point to make about the English
class system in the post-war settlement” (76), and the two radio versions act
as a dramatic microcosm of the troubled
relationship between the middle and lower classes. As in everyday life
in an unequal society, the manner of speaking is as important as the words’
meaning, and the voices presented here express conflict in how they speak as
much as what they say. Gerald’s
irritation at not being served by the railwaymen (who deflect his appeal for
help with the bags) is vividly conveyed, and his disapproval of Hilda
(implicitly a “common” woman) is registered in the contrast between Gerald’s
commanding tone in a clipped accent and the landlady’s anecdotal, shapeless
droning. He speaks in the accent of power and command, and they refuse to act
with the appropriate deference.
This
situation, implied in the silent text of the original story, is promoted in the
plays, dramatising the idea that in Holihaven middle-class propriety is denied.
The power of a bourgeois accent is meaningless in this setting, presenting in
an aural form the class anxiety that underpins the story and that is found
throughout Aickman’s fiction. Its final powerlessness, we might say, is
conveyed in the arrival of the dead and their revellers. Aickman describes this
moment in terms which are defined by the differences in class-accent and its
dangerous implications. The Bansteads speak in Standard, non-regional English
as they cower in terror, while the racket outside is described as the sound of
proletarian yokels, “agitators bawling a slogan, or massed troublemakers at a
football match” (“Ringing”, 74). This formless shouting and bellowing is
overpoweringly presented on the radio, viscerally conveying the idea that the
bourgeois voice (the agent of correctness, power and “normality”) is impotent
in the face of the formless desires of the masses. This seems snobbish, but we
have to remember that the dead (speaking in dialect, shouting loutishly and
thrashing around) are more vital, paradoxically more alive, than the
middle-class speakers of the Queen’s English. The plays postulate this riddle
in accordance with the text, and the effect is unsettling in that both sets of accents are ultimately
oppressive and destructive.
This
complex interplay, uncovering the social implications in Aickman’s writing,
typifies the sophisticated way in which dialogue is exploited for dramatic
effect. Dialogue is also used to advance the story, and here, once again,
Aickman provides a template. The initial moment of horror, when Shotcroft
convinces Gerald of the terrible truth, is figured as a script of terse
statements:
“Take
her away, man,” said the Commandant, with scornful ferocity.
“In
a day or two perhaps,” said Gerald, patiently polite. “I admit that we are
disappointed with Holihaven.”
“Now.
While there’s still time. This instant.”
“They
can hardly go on practising all night,” he said. But now it was fear that
hushed his voice.
“Practising!”
The Commandant’s scorn flickered coldly through the overheated room.
“What
else?”
“They’re
ringing to wake the dead.” (“Ringing”, 60).
Functioning as a play-text which
progresses the story to the next stage, these words are ready-made material.
Indeed, Aickman does all the work. The exchange is animated by the immediacy of
surprise, and he offers what are essentially stage-directions, telling us
exactly how the words should be spoken in the form of the Commandant’s
“scornful ferocity” and the hushing of Gerald’s voice as he realizes the truth
of what is said. It seems, once again, as if Aickman is writing for the radio,
and all the writers of the broadcasts have to do is preserve the original text
and give it a spoken form. This they do with great effectiveness. The
Commandant’s “scornful ferocity” is witheringly spoken in both versions, and
Gerald’s fear is given subtle dimensions by George Baker’s intonation in the
BBC treatment.
The urgency of the exchange propels
the narrative forward in the short story and in the adaptations the pace likewise
quickens. Underpinning this movement there is of course the overwhelming
emphasis on the bells. Gerald describes Holihaven as a “very noisy place” (59),
and the radio plays are practically overwhelmed by the clangour. The BBC
version made use of a new recording, and in both treatments the “booming” of
bells “like warriors fighting in the sky” (46) is maintained throughout. Like
Phyrnne, who hears the ringing “with my left ear, and another lot with my
right” (47), the listener is assaulted by the noise. Gerald’s half-deafened
terror becomes the listener’s as our hearing struggles to cope with the
cacophony, identifying with his discomfiture, “tautly listening” (47) to the
developing clangour.
However, this grisly campanology is only part
of what Richard Hand describes as the story’s “aural register” (155). Critics
have routinely spoken of the bizarre implications of the inescapable ringing,
but it is important to point out that the story as a whole is arranged as a
montage of significant sounds. As with the dialogue, so too with the
background, the author constructs a ready-made, orchestrated framework which
establishes the narrative and moves it towards a climax not of sound, but of
silence. This structure underpins both broadcasts and once again the writers
exploit the lexical markers in the story, converting them from descriptions of
sounds into the sounds – or “sound signs” – themselves. They also expand the
text’s aural textures by adding others which are implied but not heard.
Within this “noisy place” (59) the
narrative is opened by the blowing of a whistle and the sound of the train’s
rumbling (39). This opening effect is in the foreground of both plays, although
each are obliged to add the unmentioned sound of a steam engine; this would
have been taken for granted by readers of 1964, but is unfamiliar to the later
radio audiences. Once the couple have arrived, however, Aickman provides a list
of sounds that appear, in seamless transition, on the airwaves. The single bell
initiates the sense of uncertainty, and thereafter we hear bells that boom (41,
46) in ‘deep note[s]’ (41–2), a ‘din’ (49) in the manner of firing ‘artillery’
(52), a Coffee Room bell that sounds ‘like a fire-alarm’ (51), an ‘inferno of
ringing’ (69), shouting and singing in the street (75) and, finally, the glass,
china and wood-work smashing into pieces as the dead bodies storm the
Bansteads’ bedroom (75).
This arrangement works, in short, to
create a progressive sense of tension. The louder it becomes, the more agitated
Gerald gets, and the more terrifying the denouement becomes. At the same time,
Aickman breaks the sound for dramatic effect, and both Cherrie and Gatiss and
Dyson integrate this element, presenting clear caesuras in the noise. On radio,
spaces without sound can be as effective as sound itself and, as the narrative
moves towards its climax, the silence in the text becomes in the broadcasts a
moment of dread and tension that forces the listener to strain for the next
significant clue. As the Bansteads wait, the sudden diminution to a single bell
in the text is matched by a weighted silence on the radio with “no sound of any
kind … not a creaking floorboard or a prowling cat or a distant owl’ (70–71).
This gives way to a “thick bucolic accent,” a “guttural vibrato of emotion”
(72) which is then taken up by the “pandemonium” (69) of the deafening noise of
the milling dead, “scraping …scuffling … singing …banging” (75). These effects
overwhelm the soundtrack. The actors’ shrieking and screaming are powerful
enactments of the characters’ terror, marking aurally the extreme point of
distance from their light flirtations in perfect Home County accents, and the
singing of the dead is enhanced in both versions with extra, demonic muttering
and growling. The action is closed by the gravediggers working “silently” (80),
though in the Canadian version the scraping of spades is distinctly heard.
It might
thus be argued that Aickman provides the radio dramatists with a series of
ready-made structures which enable them to adapt the material with efficiency
and directness. The formal arrangement of the story, with its controlled
narrative, terse dialogue and graded sounds make it, as noted earlier, a
perfect piece for the assailing of our ears.
Showing it on the stage or film would probably be ineffective, running
the risk of degenerating into just another retread of the zombie-genre. But it
is the perfect starting point for a radio drama in which the “mind-visible”
(McInerey, 8) is allowed to prevail, implanting the strongest of individual
imaginings through the medium of highly textured sound. There are further
complications, however. Although I have suggested the interchangeability of the
structures, with the prose text providing a script for a play of voices, it is
important to remember that Aickman’s short story is not and cannot be the same
as the radio dramatizations. Aickman provides the ground-plan, but changes have
to be made in addition to the elements that are preserved. As Albrecht-Crane
and Cutchins explain of cinematic re-writing in words which also throw new
light on adaptations for the radio:
Adapters cannot “transpose” or
“transfer” [directly from one medium to another] … They must interpret,
re-working the precursor text and choosing the various meanings and sensations
they find most compelling … [and then select] scenes, characters, plot
elements, etc., that match their interpretation (16).
The
richness of the two versions of “Ringing the Changes” is vested in the fact
that while they appear to be quite literal treatments of their source, there is
still space in which editorial changes can be made, fashioning the material to
reflect the contexts in which the broadcasts were made, and the expectations of
the audience. Most of all, Cherrie, Dyson and Gatiss uncover the nuances of
Aickman’s tale. Recognizing its status as a “fluid text … that exists in
multiple versions” (Bryant, 48), they follow the style and outline of his
writing but inflect the material, offering distinct interpretations that allow
us to understand the multifaceted nature of his work.
Gothic horror: Aickman in Canada
As noted
earlier, in Canada “Ringing the Changes” was broadcast as part of the
celebrated Nightfall series. Other
stories included Dickens’ “The Signalman”, Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw”. All of the
pieces are Gothic in tone, with the explicit intention of frightening the
audience in the relaxing setting of the fireside. Aickman’s story, with its
horrifying encounter with the dead, was an obvious candidate for inclusion.
Figured as a text within an anthology, a status it also enjoyed in print,
Cherrie’s version is shaped to fit its listening context. Phrynne and Gerald
(here called Horstead rather than Banstead) are terrified by the events, and
Cherrie harmonizes the tale with others in the series (and with other texts
within the genre as a whole) by emphasising its status as a Gothic thriller.
This shift in emphasis was achieved by making small additions to the script, by
focusing the actors’ delivery on conveying key messages and on creating the
effects of horror, especially through the use of music.
Cherrie
intensifies the suspense by preserving the more economical dialogue while
adding proleptic details of his own. The framing section ominously warns that
the tale is a “special love story for lovers of all ages” and Gerald’s opening
lines are adapted to suggest some existential doom, announced as if in
retrospect. In the original there is no suggestion of foreboding beyond his
worrying about the age difference, but in Cherrie’s dramatization Gerald
anxiously remarks that they had been “to the village at the end of all of
things” and “perhaps they tried to warn us.” Warnings they certainly receive.
In additional dialogue the railway porters tell them that they’ve “made a
mistake” visiting on “tonight of all nights,” and before the Commandant
instructs Gerald to escape, a drunken Don repeatedly tells him to “run – go.”
Each of these markers project the narrative forward and other additions, spoken
by Phrynne, have the same effect. While walking in the deserted streets she
notes that “it’s like an empty stage set. I wonder what happens when the
curtain goes up?”
Further prefigurative clues, giving new information, are applied to the encounter on the beach. Gerald asks what Phrynne has “stepped on,” and is told it is “something soft – and bone.” These warnings and speculations present more questions to be answered, and Cherrie is skillful at tantalising the listener. The reference to the object “like bone” implants the notion of a dead body, while Phrynne’s description of the streets seeming “like a tomb” amplifies the growing sense of morbid unease.
Further prefigurative clues, giving new information, are applied to the encounter on the beach. Gerald asks what Phrynne has “stepped on,” and is told it is “something soft – and bone.” These warnings and speculations present more questions to be answered, and Cherrie is skillful at tantalising the listener. The reference to the object “like bone” implants the notion of a dead body, while Phrynne’s description of the streets seeming “like a tomb” amplifies the growing sense of morbid unease.
Adding
pace in the form of these small interventions, and compressing what is already
an extremely dynamic text, Cherrie’s treatment is restless and urgent. The
hurrying of the narrative is matched by the febrile intensity of the acting and
sound effects. Gerald – brilliantly played by Douglas Campbell – speaks
impatiently to the Pascoes and the railwaymen, and the scene on the beach is
treated as a moment of climactic horror, even though in the original narrative
it is only a stage in the process of disorientation. Aickman notes simply that
Phyrnne gives a “sharp cry” (48), but in the radio play this becomes a
terrified scream. Gerald’s confusion is also intensified to the point of panic
as he shouts repeatedly, casting around in an existential darkness. A moaning
sound follows the insertion of her foot, apparently issuing from an invisible
corpse. Ugly and disturbing, the play’s soundtrack underscores the volatility
of the actors’ voices.
Built up
in these small details, Cherrie’s Gothic excess quickly moves from suggestion
to explicit horror. Tension is further developed by the unsettling music –
sometimes percussion and sometimes “acid rock” – and the mounting suspense is
formalized by dividing the text into short, episodic scenes. The score
punctuates the sections, and the opening words of each part are noticeably more
anxious in delivery as the play unfolds, accentuating the text’s staccato
rhythm. The key moment in this treatment, as in the story, is the meeting with
the Commandant. Positioned as the play’s centrifuge, his conversation with
Gerald has immense impact, a moment in which secrets, so cleverly implied in
the previous minutes, are revealed.
Played
with relish by Nightfall regular
Sandy Webster, the significance of Shotcroft’s bizarre disclosure is
accentuated in a number of ways. The terse exchanges are preserved and his key
line, “they’re ringing to wake the dead” (“Ringing”, 60) is delivered with
sneering intensity. Other changes are made elsewhere. In pursuing his Gothic
project Cherrie diminishes Shotcroft’s ambivalence, converting him from either
a troubled neurotic, or a diehard of the military type, into a sort of shaman.
His back-story is deleted and he speaks to Gerald in a curious, rasping accent
which invokes the strangeness of the foreign Other, redolent of Bela Lugosi’s
delivery in Browning’s film version of Dracula
(1931). He is certainly not a native speaker of English, let alone a
practitioner of an upper-class accent, and he seems to be timeless, speaking
from beyond the grave. Essentially a supernatural monster, he is rewritten in
this version to support the tale’s Gothic credentials. If there were any
suspicion that Gerald is subject to an indulgent imagination, it is dispelled
in his meeting with this strange creature. Shotcroft’s voice shifts the story
from the prosaic everyday into the domain of nightmare, and the story quickly
progresses to its all-too tangible conclusion.
Gerald and
Phrynne do not have time to make love or attempt to make love. The cadavers
arrive, complete with distorted voices, a demonic growling, screams and the
sort of music stereotypically associated
with horror films. The action is closed by the Banstead/Halsteads’ recovery and
here again there is a crucial change. In Aickman’s text the key moment is
Gerald’s contemplation of Phrynne’s response to the re-interment of the dead,
when she becomes momentarily aroused with her “soft mouth” becoming “fleetingly
more voluptuous still” (80). In the play, however, he simply warns her not to
look and is answered with a sensual “Why ever not, Gerald? Why ever not?” This change preserves the text’s openness but
stresses a continuing menace. Once the knowledge has been gained, it is
impossible to unlearn it.
The change
points more generally to the ways in which the text has been transformed.
Aickman’s text is a rich field of possibilities; Cherrie’s is much narrower. He
highlights the dramatic effects of suspense, but elides the subtler
implications of psycho-sexual malaise and the dynamics of the dream. In order
to make the text fit into its broadcasting context, he converts it into a
Gothic shocker which deploys a lexicon of familiar tropes. The innocent are
overwhelmed by the experience, and the comfortable certainties of the everyday
world are submerged by horrors. The fascination and threat of taboo, and the
extension of the human mind by its transformative encounters with the unknown,
are the central concerns of this interpretation, linking it to the broader
concerns of its (putative) genre. A partial reading of Aickman which is at
times too formulaic, Cherrie’s dramatization is still an unsettling experience
that highlights the original author’s capacity to create bizarre situations of
anxiety and despair.
Life in the provinces: a very
English interpretation
Cherrie’s
version stresses the horror of Aickman’s tale, and it is widely regarded as a
worthy contribution to a series that is opened by a narrator imitating the
voice of Vincent Price, set to stereotypically “spooky” organ accompaniment.
Adam Golaski notes its impact on his childish ears as he listened in terror,
and it undoubtedly made a lasting impression on many. Its appearance online has
extended its malign influence over a new generation of listeners.
In Dyson
and Gatiss’s approach (2000), on the other hand, there is less emphasis on the
visceral nastiness of the situation and more on the text’s exploration of
another sort of ugliness. Treating it as a coded exploration of the repressed
horrors of respectability, sexual repression, class and the stultifying
conditions of provincial life, these radio writers present Aickman’s tale as a
Gothic critique of British society. As noted earlier, Darryl Jones reads the
tale in sociological terms (76) and Dyson and Gatiss, working on the same
premise, rewrite it as a piece of calculated subversion. It mimics the textures
of the domestic dramas that typically feature on Radio Four, but it undermines
their orthodox, conservative view of the status quo. Their adaptation
re-positions the work in the social context in which it originated (1964),
although it also comments on the social tensions of contemporary British
society. Locating this analysis within the unfortunate encounters of Gerald and
Phyrnne, the writers point to the fissures and inconsistencies at the heart of
British (or at least English) life. This project is achieved with only small
editorial changes and additions. As in Cherrie’s version, the nuanced speaking
of the actors carries the effect.
Gender
conflicts are clearly marked by accentuating the age difference between the
main characters. Though Phrynne is supposed to be twenty–four years younger
than Gerald (“Ringing”, 38), the voices suggest the difference is much greater.
Acted by George Baker and Fiona Allen, the contrast between them is very
pronounced, with Baker sounding old enough to be her grandfather rather than her husband. This difference is initially
used to present the particular conditions of their marriage. Gerald is
essentially a boring authority figure, pompously explaining the levelling of
the railway line, while Phrynne, cast as a dependent, literally fixated by his
plangent voice, only wonders how he knows about such arcane matters. The
father/child relationship is asserted, though Dyson and Gatiss almost
immediately point to the emerging weakness in this arrangement, inserting a few
lines which suggest that Phrynne is unwilling to accept her role. Gerald claims
he is mature “like old wine”, to which she responds that he is “deliciously
full bodied.” This new line asserts her sexuality at the start of the play.
According to him she is just “cold and choosy,” a sexless “girl” (38) or a
“dead girl” (56). Yet her erotic small-talk clearly indicates she is looking
forward to their bedtime encounter and is not willing to be the passive
recipient of his affections. Her suppressed eroticism is also heightened in
other changes. The text notes that he “kissed her” (39), but in the radio play
she takes the initiative, saying “come here.” A loud kiss is heard for several
seconds, creating a mental image of a passionate embrace.
Indeed, in
this reading, Phrynne is far from the passive spouse of post-war Britain.
Though described as a kitsch child-wife – with pathetic “big eyes” and a “tiny
face” (39), a portrait in the manner of Dickens at his most sentimental and
patronising – her mature sexuality is repeatedly asserted, and her physical
attractiveness is as pronounced as her innuendoes and small-talk. Following on
from the extended kiss, the railwaymen are positioned as admirers, with one
lasciviously noting in an East Anglian accent: “look at that … cor!” Both
Shotcroft and Hilda are impressed by her beauty. In Aickman’s words Hilda looks
at Phrynne’s near-naked body following the dance with “animosity” (79), but
here she is given an extra line, noting with regret that “she’s very
beautiful.”
More importantly, the writers stress Gerald’s
discomfiture as he contemplates his wife’s behaviour, becoming progressively
more anxious as the evening unfolds. One key line underpins this
interpretation. We are told in the original text that she “opened her pretty
legs to the fire” (53), but in the play Gerald’s response is the focus: “Don’t
sit like that, Phrynne.” The line is spoken with an embarrassed tone which
leads immediately to suppressed anger as he notices the Commandant inspecting
her with her legs apart. “Why are you standing there?” he demands. Phrynne’s
appeal is obvious and, crucially, she is willing to display herself.
This
reorientation brings to the foreground the subtext and highlights the notion of
the couple’s mismatch – with an older man in sexual decline married to a young
women whose sexuality is on the point of release. The contrast is made entirely
apparent following the danse macabre.
Phyrnne (“almost naked”) is found downstairs at The Bell, while the Commandant
has to help Gerald to walk. He is infirm, suddenly a very old man, while she is
still luxuriating in her erotic encounter. This juxtaposition forms the
dramatic core of Dyson and Gatiss’ treatment. Framing the tale as a contrast
between repression and release, self-expression and fear, it presents Aickman’s
tale as a study of sexual dysfunction in which Phyrnne’s encounter with her
erotic self is a positive event.
Not quite
a feminist tract, the play suggests that her transformation, her ringing of the
changes, involves the death of her old self, which is cast aside when the dead
literally dance anew and her vitality is re-discovered. Her marriage is already
a grave and her grisly release is a resurrection - an escape from Gerald’s
deathly presence. The point is clinched in the final sections of new dialogue,
giving voice to a silent passage in Aickman’s text. Phrynne notices the
re-interments and Gerald informs her that “ploughing” (shifting the action from
the cemetery to a field) is taking place. Yet she immediately contradicts him:
“they’re not ploughing, they’re sowing.” The “sowing” is her recognition of the
awakening of her sexuality, and she closes the play with laughter and a sort of
post-coital humming - a version of the mob’s singing. At the same time, she has
taken control of her life and is no longer the inert recipient of his dull
conversation. Talking down her husband symbolizes her new awareness of her own
desires, and nothing he can say is important. “None of it matters any more,”
she remarks, and the listener is left with an overwhelming sense of Gerald’s
irrelevance as he lectures her on the sights of Cambridge. Their marriage has
been fractured by her realization of her husband’s impotent uselessness as she
seeks to express her erotic desire. Sombre oboe tones, which have punctuated
the scenes, suggest the joyless, sexless years that will lie ahead.
Read in
these terms, Gatiss and Dyson’s adaption is another treatment of a classic
British theme: repression. The casting of the voices and the small inflections
divert Aickman’s tale away from its Freudian track and re-cast it as a study of
the sheer dullness of bourgeois respectability, and the psychological
transformation that is needed to escape. Phyrnne, with her enhanced dialogue
and voluptuous tones, is an iconoclast. She breaks the rules of middle-class
propriety and asserts the text’s application as a mode of social criticism. It
reminds us that the story’s first appearance was in 1964. Phyrnne is cast as a
liberated woman of the sixties who rejects the stultifying lifestyle offered by
the moribund Gerald, the emblem of an old-fashioned paternalism. It is equally
relevant to audiences of 2000, projecting Aickman’s tale into a social arena in
which women are still treated as objects and trophy wives. In this version,
Phrynne’s dance with the dead is a dance to escape the limitations of sexism
and male domination.
This
assault on bourgeois mores has other applications in the treatment of class
tension. As noted earlier, accents are used in both plays to register the
difference between the bourgeois characters and the others, with each radio-text
reflecting on the powerlessness of class superiority. Gerald, Phrynne and the
Commandant are used to taking control and giving orders but the voice of
privilege is useless in the context of Holihaven. For British listeners,
however, the impotence of class-based authority has another, troubling
dimension. The differences in accent and the differences between Standard and regional
English are amplified in the BBC version with the aim of accentuating the
couple’s sense of embarrassment and uncertainty. Gerald, though commanding,
barely knows how to speak to the Pascoes, and adopts an inappropriate tone when
he is speaking to the railwaymen. The denial of the usual response breaks the
code of propriety and politeness, adding a sense of isolation to the developing
sense of social anxiety. It is further accentuated by the Bansteads’ position
between the unruly proletariat and the upper-class Commandant, whose cut-glass
accent, spoken with cold precision by Michael Cochran, is as intimidating as
the roughness of the other characters. Caught between the threatening
coarseness of the under-educated and the arrogant dismissiveness of the
upper-class Shotcroft, who treats Gerald with contempt, the Bansteads are
placed in a familiar British trap. Voices connote the acceptable transactions
of social discourse, but here the skewing of the register, with none of the
rules being obeyed, adds materially to Gerald’s unease and Phyrnne’s
bewilderment. With no other middle-class characters in the hotel, their
fearfulness is intensified by their social isolation. Taken out of their
milieu, with no one to speak to from their own class and taken away from their
usual, reassuring routines, they are indeed outsiders, menaced by the rituals
of a remote and inward looking community.
Indeed,
Gatiss and Dyson focus on the provincialism of Holihaven, stressing its
detachment, as a run-down backwater, from everyday life. The play removes
Gerald and Phrynne from their social context by accentuating the conflicts of
accents, and it removes them geographically from their Home Counties setting as
well. Gerald is given extra lines to highlight the sense of difference. He
explains the slowness of the train as a matter of Holihaven being part of a
quieter lifestyle, a place where “Time matters less,” although his commentary
is ironically contradicted when they arrive at the imagined rural idyll.
Anything but cheerful bucolics, the railwaymen are rude and uncooperative, the
streets are empty, the bells deafening, and the Pascoes unwelcoming. The town
is redundant - even the sea has
retreated from it. In this treatment it is also unrelievedly bleak. At several
points during the walk to the sea the added sound of wind is heard, evoking a
sense of melancholy, and the intimacy of the couple’s conversations is
undermined by subtle echoes, stressing the coldness of the empty streets.
Caught in a drear and uninviting place, the Bansteads are the quintessential
outsiders, the emblematic “civilized” people who, through some aberration, have
moved from normal life to the abnormal, from reason to the strangeness of the
archetypal, secretive “village” (“Ringing”, 39) of the Gothic imagination.
This
emphasis aligns the reading with the enduring idea of the menace of the British
provinces and here, once again, the appeal is directly to the home audience.
Gerald imagines Holihaven in the stereotypical terms of the English paradise,
the place of quaint streets and picturesque quayside, but Gatiss and Dyson
uncover the darker side of the equation. Drawing on the tradition of remote
communities as traps, the writers’ emphasis on Holihaven’s hostility connects
their text most immediately with David Pinner’s novel, Ritual (1967), and Robin Hardy’s film treatment of the same
material, The Wicker Man (1973).
Somehow drawn to the place, Gerald and Phrynne are the unwilling participants
who turn up at the least appropriate moment, and Gerald can be viewed as
another version of the fated Sgt. Howie, the sexless, fearful puritan in
Hardy’s film [3]. Like him, the Bansteads are allowed to see a pagan Britain,
with bells raising rather than burying the dead in a curious subversion of the
everyday structures of the prevailing, “normal” culture, and in paradoxical
mockery of the Christian notion of resurrection.
In short, this treatment probes some particularly British
anxieties, linking Aickman’s text to English Gothic by locating it within a
discourse of social, sexual and cultural alienation. It pushes to the fore his
story’s function as a critique and it suggests the range of its application,
anatomizing the tensions lying at the heart of a series of codes. More
understated and resonant than Cherrie’s version, its very rectitude is
unsettling. Until the dead arrive, the play sounds like just another domestic
drama on Radio 4, intensifying its horror by containing it within the
reasonable tones of the English bourgeoisie.
Aickman and the radio
Both radio
treatments of “Ringing the Changes” are accomplished works. A challenge to the
listener, they preserve and promote the intensity of their source material
while also providing lucid explication of Aickman’s ideas for a series of
audiences. More interestingly, they inflect the story with seamless additions
and small changes of emphasis, allowing us to view the material as a Gothic
shocker and as an analysis of social and sexual mores. Like all good
adaptations, the radio versions enhance the original text, pointing to its
underlying tensions and its considerable density and richness. Stimulating and
strange, they are worthy treatments of this most complicated of writers,
allowing us to enter his world in ways which extend beyond the limitations of
the visual and the literal.
Notes
1.
This
programme was broadcast as part of BBC 2’s Late
Night Horror series at 23:10 on 17th May 1968. Directed by Naomi Capon, the
main parts were played by Ronald Hines and Michelle Dotrice. Its details have
been preserved by the BFI.
Prior to the setting up of a professionally run archive in
the mid-seventies, it was the BBC’s practice to delete its videotaped
programmes once they had been broadcast, repeated and/or sold to foreign
broadcasters. The relatively high cost of video at the time meant that erased
material was taped over. This procedure was followed with scant respect for
quality, with some outstanding programmes of the period being preserved and
others, now considered significant, being discarded. We are fortunate in that
most of the BBC’s “Gothic strand,” including masterworks such as Kneale’s The Stone Tape (1972) and John Bowen’s Robin Redbreast (1970) have been saved,
and are now under the protection of the BFI. The Bells from Hell was not one of the survivors, unless, as has
happened with a large amount of material, some copies still exist in overseas
archives or private ownership. Material mounted on 16 mm. colour film (such as
Lawrence Gordon Clark’s treatments of Dickens and M.R. James) is fortunately
intact.
2.
I
can find no details of P. Norman Cherrie’s writing career beyond his
contributions to Nightfall. Mark
Gatiss and Jeremy Dyson, on the other hand, are well-known British writers and
actors. They are best known for their black comedy, The League of Gentleman, which was broadcast by the BBC in three
series and nineteen episodes, 1999–2002. The incongruous and menacing tone of
these programmes reflects the writers’ interest in Aickman. Both are champions
of his work.
3.
The
casting of Barbara Shelley as Hilda Pascoe is a playful reference to the text’s
connection with cinematic versions of British Gothic. Shelley played the “love
interest,” menaced by vampires and monsters, in many Hammer films of the
fifties and sixties, bringing authenticity to her parts as she does to her
reading of Hilda.
The plot of “Ringing
the Changes” (1964) is echoed in many morbid, low-budget Hammer films of the
period that typically show middle and upper-class characters (doctors,
scientists, landowners) being threatened by inexplicable traditions and the
menace of an unknowable peasantry. Aickman’s tale is most closely related to
John Gilling’s Plague of the Zombies
(1966), an effective “B” film in which the dead overwhelm a small Cornish
village.
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