Nathan Reynoso
Major/Minor: BFA Creative Writing, BA Theatre
Title: Rebuilding Identities: British radio dramas in the late ‘40s and ‘50s
Abstract: Despite the United Kingdom’s victory over the Axis powers in 1945, the country had a new enemy to fight at home: recovery. Specifically, the U.K. faced a £35 million debt; one in three households were bombed; 60,595 civilians were killed; and ongoing food rationing. Given these conditions, how could a war-torn U.K. unite and rebuild its country’s strength? What was affordable to manifest the identities of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland to stimulate national pride? And what would it mean to be British in the post-War era? Within the paradigms of Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined communities,” I demonstrate how post-War radio dramas broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) contributed to the development of a classless society with a reawakening of regionalism as a medium to express national unity. By analyzing two radio dramas from each nation in the U.K., I expose the reconstruction of their identities in the productions’ script (i.e., plot, language, cast, and stage directions) and aural elements (i.e., accents, SFXs, and music). These auditory performances in the late ‘40s and ‘50s were not just a medium for entertainment but products of print-welfarism that represented the “nation-ness” of the U.K. and reshaped post-War British society.
