Moira Armstrong (1975)
[A bit daft to exhume this note but I wanted to because I remember After the Solo as a TV play which, at the age of nineteen, I especially enjoyed. (Broadcast by the BBC on 25 November 1975, it was, as far as I can see, never repeated.) The trouble is, forty plus years on, I don’t remember too much else about it – and what I jotted down at the time is hard to decipher now. The quotes below are the gist of the lines rather than verbatim. Some of the plot details may be shaky too.]
After the Solo by John Challen was a Play for Today about an unprepossessing, truculent schoolboy called Ralph Dawson. He doesn’t get on well with his authoritarian father or quiet, distant mother. He’s disliked by his classmates and by the staff at his boys-only secondary school. Ralph’s one talent is his singing voice. He belongs to a choral society and is chosen by its romantic, thoughtful choirmaster to sing a soprano solo in a performance of Fauré’s Requiem. He falls out with one of his few friends and nastily hits him with a piece of slate. Ralph is set upon and humiliated by a gang, as revenge for what he did to the other boy. He’s frightened by the threat of further rough treatment from them, and that his voice will be damaged as a result. Ralph receives, instead of weekly pocket money, monthly ‘merit’ money. The amount is assessed by his father, according to the balance of Ralph’s good and bad deeds in the intervening weeks. The cash is kept under lock and key but Ralph, in increasing need of danger money, manages to steal from it. On the night of the performance, when the time for his solo arrives, Ralph at first can’t bring himself to begin but, once the lady mainstay of the choral society leaps in to substitute, he stands up and sings. He is warmly applauded. He returns home, knowing that the time has come for him to be rewarded for his singing efforts and for Mr Dawson to discover the theft. Ralph faces his father but with one eye on the money box.
This was the best single drama I’ve watched on television this year. It was refreshing to see a Play for Today that didn’t push beyond the clear limits of its conception to try and make big points – which instead made its points so effectively that they seemed important ones. The eccentric Welsh choirmaster Peters wasn’t a brilliant conception but Gerald James underplayed him well: he made us listen to what Peters was saying behind his Celtic emotionality. He stressed how poignant the solo would be if Ralph sang it. The whole Fauré work, Peters said, was about transience; the ephemeral nature of a boy’s treble voice would be touchingly appropriate. This was an essential theme of the play: Ralph’s voice temporarily transcended his unattractive personality but that voice would soon disappear. But the boy’s unattractiveness was paradoxically appealing too. Reticent and with little awareness of other people, Ralph was also free of pretence and slyness – in contrast to his father or his teachers or the bitchy sopranos in the choir (their bitchiness was shown in an obvious and mechanical way: they were given a line apiece to convey it).
Ralph’s father wasn’t sufficiently developed. Leonard Rossiter – a clever and amusing actor but not, it seems, a very versatile one – smothered what character there was in the adenoidal fusspot that he created. Although we could see flickers of pride and love for his son, Mr Dawson criticised Ralph relentlessly even when the latter was trying to be co-operative. Of his new school blazer:
Dawson: Now you won’t grow out of it, will you?
Ralph: No, I won’t.
Dawson: No, I won’t, he says! Well, there’s nothing we can do about that – you will grow out of it!
Mr Dawson knows that his son is there to be upbraided and disciplined without knowing why. At home, he talks with a sickening, droning overconfidence. He gloats in the little victories he wins over his strange, distant wife (Geraldine Newman) when they argue about Ralph. At a PTA meeting, Mr Dawson is a haranguing, humourless pain in the neck – determined to keep talking and criticising his son, clinging leech-like to the headmaster (Barrie Cookson), who avoids Dawson with impatient, almost physical distaste. Leonard Rossiter – with that serpentine quality of speech and physical movement that is his speciality – was too theatrically big for Mr Dawson. You were always conscious this was a performance, albeit an entertaining one.
It’s a remark by the father that gives the play its title. Agreeing to Ralph’s taking the solo, Mr Dawson tells the choirmaster:
‘Yes, he’s your responsibility for that. Then after the solo, after the applause has ended, he’s my responsibility for good.’
The remark was too neat a summing up (and the meaning of such parental responsibility wasn’t really explored). Even so, the pivotal importance of Ralph’s solo guaranteed the play a strong and suspenseful climax. Once he’d sung the solo, the boy would have to admit to his father that he’d stolen money from him; soon enough, his voice would break too and he’d have nothing going for him. The writer John Challen intelligently restricted himself to pointing up the threats to Ralph of these specific changes, instead of trying to work up a vague loss-of-innocence-end-of-childhood theme.
What made the play work was newcomer Nicholas Watson’s playing of Ralph. With his heavy, bulldog face, sullen mien and unremarkable speaking voice, he looked primitive and sounded mechanical – both qualities were strongly expressive of the character. The poignancy of Watson’s solo was extraordinary, for three reasons. First, because the purity and clarity of his treble voice transcended Ralph’s dull appearance (this brought to mind R S Thomas’s poem A Blackbird Singing). Second, because, like the choirmaster, one was aware that the sweet voice was transient (thickset Ralph already seemed to be a young man as much as a boy). Third, because Ralph himself was unaware of these things – his thoughts were rather on the cash box.
Moira Armstrong’s direction of the choir’s performance was effective in its restraint. Elsewhere, the contrast between Ralph’s personality and singing was emphasised too obviously – images of the boy misbehaving were accompanied by the sound of his choir voice on the soundtrack. I could have done without a shot of Ralph and his friend as small figures in an industrial landscape; this is such a tired device that, by now, it’s hardly a social comment at all, merely a realistic screen drama convention. The play was much more effective in getting across its failure-to-communicate theme. The actors often delivered their lines in a way that showed the words meant much more to the person speaking them than to anyone else in earshot. In contrast, when Ralph sang his solo, what poured out seemed hardly to belong to him at all – it meant more to the adults in the audience than to the boy producing the sounds. All in all, After the Solo was a strong and moving piece of work.
[1975]
