Raymond Raikes

Biography

Raymond Montgomery Raikes was born on the 13th of September 1910 in Putney south west London to a classical, upper middle class family. His Father Charles was a court Judge and in his spare time a West End theatre stage and set designer, whilst his Mother was a classical opera singer. He could not escape being stage-struck from an early age. Although a philanthropic forebear, Robert Raikes, had helped to found the Sunday School movement, his father, a man of private means In 1925 built himself a private theatre in the semi-basement of his Upper Norwood house and here the young Raymond worked as actor, director, stagehand and administrator. He was educated at Lambrook prep school, then Uppingham. After school he went to Exeter College, Oxford to read classics and there came under the influence of Nevill Coghill and the Oxford University Dramatic Society (Ouds). In one of the society's productions, James Elroy Flecker's Hassan with music by Delius, he played the lead opposite Peggy Ashcroft. On leaving university and after a year with the Birmingham Rep, in 1935 he joined Stratford's Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, where he played in his beloved Shakespeare for several seasons. Among his roles were Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet and Laertes to Donald Wolfit's Hamlet. Returning to London he played romantic leads such as the young naval officer in the West End success While Parents Sleep (1931)(that success saw it adapted into the film While Parents Sleep (1935)). His first film role (uncredited) was in the classic The Water Gipsies (1932) produced by the now legendary Maurice Elvey followed by The Poisoned Diamond (1933). His next role was as a white-uniformed Ruritanian in April Blossoms (1934) starring Richard Tauber and then It's a Bet (1935). War interrupted his theatrical career. A friend who had worked with him at his father's theatre was the BBC announcer Alvar Liddell. He suggested that Raikes enter a competition being held by Forces Broadcasting, who were looking for announcers. Raikes was co-winner with Franklyn Engelman and spent two years in BBC Presentation before joining the Royal Signals, with whom he served in Italy and North Africa. On his return to London he followed George Melachrino, the band leader, as RSM of his unit where most of the personnel under him were members of dance bands of the period. Whilst an officer by day he was translating plays from Greek into English by night. One of these, Iphigeneia in Aulis by Euripides, was to be his farewell BBC radio production in 1975. On demobilisation in 1947 he was appointed to the BBC Drama Department. First he worked on the soap opera The Robinson Family, and then Dick Barton, Special Agent, the hugely popular daily thriller serial and precursor for James Bond. Having served an apprenticeship at the coalface of popular radio, Raikes found his true niche producing plays for the new Third Programme, for the "World Theatre" series of great international classics and for the "National Theatre of the Air", of which he became executive producer in 1961. One of his last productions was to produce and direct Sir Ian McKellen in Henry V in London in 1974. He regularly worked with Richard Burton Sir Ralph Richardson, Sir Laurence Olivier, Dame Peggy Ashcroft among others He made the process of realising the most arcane minor Jacobean script into a piece of fun. He introduced audiences to the wealth of our more obscure English heritage with plays like The London Cuckolds by Edward Ravenscroft (performed in 1999 at the Royal National Theatre), Arden of Faversham, A Woman Killed by Kindness, A Journey to London, Love in a Village, Lionel and Clarissa and Nathaniel Lee's Lucius Julius Brutus. He directed 17 of Shakespeare's plays on radio, the Agammemnon trilogy of Aeschylus, The Wasps and Lysistrata by Aristophanes, The Bacchae, Medea and Hippolytus by Euripides. He had the ability to make the most flamboyant, theatrical Restoration comedies comprehensible and acceptable in a medium best suited to the understated and the quiet in drama. Raikes had begun his career as a man of the theatre and, for him, radio drama was another form of theatre. Most continental broadcasters have a Drama Department, involved with specially written works, and a Radio Theatre department, which concentrates on existing literature. He preferred the absent author to the present one, because the absent cannot interfere. He was no academic purist, but a scion of show business who always referred to a production as "the show". He rewrote parts of plays by absent playwrights for the sake of clarification, "improved" contemporary translations of Greek texts and "eased" translations by living French writers such as Henry de Montherlant or Jean Anouilh. The works of the latter he did much to promote via radio before his meeting popular success in the West End theatre of the Fifties. A scholar would note that the hand of Raikes is evident in most of the Shakespeare texts he directed. For the average listener this blasphemy would only make things clearer. With the arrival of stereophony he felt the requirements of the stage could even more easily be transferred to the radio studio and he pursued the innovation with enthusiasm, often in the face of managerial opposition. His first stereo experiment, scenes from Sherlock Holmes, was transmitted well after midnight on 6 July 1958. His innovative endeavours received international recognition when his production of The Foundling by Peter Gurney, with music by Humphrey Searle, received the Prix Italia for stereophonic production in 1965. In this annus mirabilis for him he was also awarded the Prix Italia for his production of The Anger of Achilles by Robert Graves, with music by Roberto Gerhard. No tangible award was accorded to his greatest achievement, in which his desire to educate and inform combined with his need to entertain. This was a mammoth survey, in 13 parts, of English drama from its earliest beginnings to the present day entitled The First Stage. Written with John Barton and presented by him, this was broadcast on the Third Programme, 1956-57. While Raymond Raikes was working at the BBC, the kind of plays and programmes he produced was staple diet on radio and remained so until the Birtian revolution of recent years. The enthusiasm of this one man was trusted and encouraged by successive controllers and two heads of Radio Drama - Val Gielgud (though not without some struggle) and Martin Esslin. Audiences were made aware of a wealth of dramatic literature which they would not otherwise have encountered in performances either because of the prohibitive costs of production in other media or because of the absence of a nearby theatre. There would be no place for such as him in the non-smoking, accountancy-led BBC of today in which a mere 30 new drama productions per year appear on Radio 3 and only a handful of plays longer than one hour's duration are made for Radio 4. Those who are old enough must be grateful for the riches they have enjoyed. For the young it is another matter. And will there ever be anything again on radio to thrill us as did Dick Barton, Special Agent..."Produced by Raymond Raikes "?