By Brittaney Mann
The Victoria and Albert Museum had so much art, clothes, jewelry, furniture, and so on. I enjoyed every moment of walking around here. I spent most of my time looking at the clothes and admiring (also wishing that I had) the many beautiful, elegant dresses. The art piece that I picked was not an article of clothing though, I found something that reminded me of two of the plays we watched together.
Volksempfänger (People’s Receiver) was the art piece that struck me the most because it reminded me of Dancing at Lughnasa and The Mousetrap. The most obvious reason is that this piece is a radio, and Dancing at Lughnasa and The Mousetrap both included radios as important props to the stage. This piece has a darker context that I am going to dive into later in the post after exploring the radio in general.
In Dancing at Lughnasa, the radio brought something new and from the present day into a house and city that had not caught up with the rest of the world in industrializing everything. Radios were such an important part of sharing the news, but also for various forms of entertainment. In Dancing at Lughnasa, the audience gets to experience how people would have received entertainment through music from the radio, but The Mousetrap (at least in the first act before they could not continue the performance), showed all uses of the radio.
In The Mousetrap, the radio is first used shown being as a source of news as the voice coming from it describes two killers and a murder that happened. The other times the radio sounded during the first act were for entertainment purposes. The first time it was for music and the second time for a story.
In both of these plays, the radio seamlessly sounded songs or somber news, and I could not believe that it was simply a prop. The characters looked like they were actually controlling the knobs and searching for a station on the waves and finally finding it. I feel like that is a bit of a hard thing to accomplish because timing of each movement and sound is so important to making that action believable. In both these plays though, I remember how well the characters did standing at the radio and looking like they were actually using it, and I loved it.
This piece reminded me of two films I watched in my Media and Society class. First, “Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio,” and “Citizen Kane.” I do not remember every detail of this films because I watched them three years ago as a freshman, but I remember they beautifully and emotionally exemplified the importance of the radio. I remember when I watched “The Men Who Made Radio,” I cried because I did not realize how emotional at story about radio companies would be, but man, it was a very good film.
This piece also freaked me out a bit because the description of it mentioned that with this radio, which was more affordable than many other radios, the Nazis were able to spread propaganda to many houses in Germany — two-thirds of homes owned one of these radios.
Technology keeps progressing and becoming easier to have access to. In some ways, this is great; it lifts barriers for creative people to have a platform, news organizations can share breaking news immediately and people do not have to be in front of a television to hear it, we can connect with others all over the place, and the benefits go on. At the same time though, we have Twitter, Facebook, and various sites where people can share and consume extremist material, and for some disgusting reason, some of it is still Nazi or fascism oriented.
Theatre in London U of A 