Radio theatre is not a thing of the past even in today's digital world

For 10 years there has been an idea for a separate platform dedicated to radio theatre accessible to a wider audience

published on 2/13/24 4:02 PM

Photo: Pixabay

"With the advent of the radio, a new kind of work appeared - the radio play, the auditory play, as some call it.... The action must be born and developed in the moment, without particular returns to the past or deviations," writes Sirak Skitnik - the first director of the Bulgarian National Radio. During his time, with the broadcast of the play The Winged Help by Angel Karaliychev and Matvey Valev, the beginning of the radio theater in Bulgaria was laid.

The reason for its appearance is really interesting. In 1937, the magazine "Letets" (Aviator) announced a "competition to write a radio play with an aviation story". 11 texts applied, and the first prize of the Aviation Directorate went to Easter Evening by Angel Karaliychev and Matvei Valev. The second place went to The Steel Eagle by Petar Vitanov, and the third place to the documentary play Above Edirne, 1913 by Irina Petrova.

The play, which received the first prize, was broadcast live under the title "The Winged Help" on Radio Varna on December 26, 1938. It included 3 acts and 12 characters.

‎75 years later, in 2014, the play was staged again – this time ‎on the stage of the First Studio of the BNR. Dozens of friends of the radio theatre took part in the preparation, recalls the chief producer of the Radio Theatre of the Bulgarian National Radio, Daniela Manolova. Among them are the composer and then director of the Hristo Botev Culture and Education Channel Stefan Dimitrov, pianists Antoni Donchev and Mikhail Shishkov, actors Nikolai Urumov, Velislav Pavlov, Leart Dokle and Ivan Yurukov, and the journalist Asen Grigorov plays the role of host of the show. ‎

"He did a great job", Daniela is emphatic and adds: "We also invited firefighters to the audience, and he conducted a dialogue with them and the rest of the spectators and listeners of the performance, and at the same time, multimedia was running, in which we had taken the trouble we find old photos of airplanes that were at airports in Bulgaria and different models of airplanes from that era, and also very old photos of mines in Bulgaria at that time, because the action takes place in a mine. There is a collapse, there is danger to the lives of many people, and all that action could be reproduced through the sound effects."‎

The beloved actor of generations of Bulgarians - Itzhak Fintzi who turned 90 last year, was one of the first listeners of the Bulgarian radio theatre.

"The first thing that connects me to radio theatre is listening. I remember that as a child I listened to the radio, we had an old Austrian radio, the actor Nikola Balabanov, and I was strongly impressed by how he told stories, how he imitated animals. I followed that, and maybe my parents also encouraged me and let me listen," he says. ‎

Later, as a student and as an actor, Fintzi returned to the radio again as a participant in the radio theatre:

‎"It so happened that I actually participated in quite a few plays - both for children and for adults. I remember the atmosphere and the work schedule. It also happened that I would go to pick up the play in advance to read it at home, but very often I went to the Radio, I received it there and rehearsed it in the corridor, as we all did, who participated often," says the actor.‎

Today, the Golden Fund and the Audio Archive of the Bulgarian National Radio store 4,000 radio plays and dramatizations, which are being digitized gradually. ‎

‎"I'm glad that this process is going carefully and gradually, because ‎these are really titles that require serious work. Some of them are analog ‎recordings that were made in later years. There the mixing, even in ‎these analog conditions when on 4-5 tape recorders 4 or 5 people play 4 or 5 tapes in order to make the mix of these recordings, in general it reaches the level of quality that we are currently looking for and achieve digitally," notes Daniela Manolova. "Other recordings, however, were made even earlier, and in them one of the actors' voices may have drowned in very loud music, and we would like, at the moment when we do the digitization, to slightly improve, as much as possible, on finished record, all these little details in one whole audio product what we call radio theatre in the end."

The digitization of already recorded radio plays is an opportunity for BNR to attract the interest of young people to audio content, of which it is the only producer in Bulgaria. According to Daniela, such an idea has been around for at least 10 years:‎

"We also had a very seriously considered project for a separate platform for radio theatre where both documentary and feature productions and readings could be uploaded. However, there is a big question here, which is related to the settlement of the rights of these performances, which has to go in parallel with the upload of each title. There are many accompanying things, apart from the web design, the uploading and downloading itself, the registration of the listenings and so on. It is a complex picture, but such a project exists, and in my opinion it is a matter of a general strategy to have the support of BNR as management in order to achieve its realization", says Daniela Manolova, recalling that a similar thing happened with BNR's content and programmes for children, which for years have had their own dedicated online platform.

Photos: Pixabay, Facebook /Справочна редакция, BNR, BGNES, BULPHOTO

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