The Mercury Theatre

The Mercury Theatre on the Air was the radio home of Welles's ground-breaking Mercury Theatre Company. Following the success of Welles's radio adaptation of Hugo's Les Miserables, CBS requested a 13-episode run with Welles starring and directing, transferring the already well-regarded Mercury Theatre to the radio..

First broadcast at 9pm on July 11, 1938, the productions were hour-long adaptations of both classic and contemporary literature, often told in the first-person, and always featuring a 23-year-old Orson Welles in the starring role(s). Their success, which had always been more critical than popular, peaked with the notorious broadcast of H.G Wells’ War of the World on October 30, 1938, which was said to have sent hordes of credulous Americans fleeing from the cities.

Delighted though Welles no doubt was by this mischief, in spite of his fervent denials, it spelled the arrival of a large sponsor - Campbell’s Soup - who changed the name and began to apply their expertise in grey soup manufacturing to radio theatre. The degree of interference by Campbell's, which went far beyond their excruciating adverts interrupting the drama, led to a slow decline in quality and to Welles’s eventual departure. The theatre continued in various guises until the mid 1940s, and a selection of these broadcasts will be added to the site.

Around half of the existing recordings are in pretty good condition and needed little more than removing hums and correcting glitches. Around a quarter required some more work removing cracks, distortion and other artefacts. A final quarter were quite badly damaged, sometimes with parts missing, and have been cleaned up as much as possible, but are not always easy on the ear. However each version is as close to the original as possible, and this is the first time they have all been remastered. I am constantly on the lookout for better master copies.

Most of the recordings contain a break around halfway through, what is sometimes revealed to be for ‘station identification’, in the middle of each recording. The words ’station break’ abruptly spoken by a weary voice with the curiously despondent slur of a man who’s fought the world and lost. This is then follow by a very long pause, the occasional high-pitched squeal to keep the viewer alert, then the same voice announces, as if it were the last thing he expected, that the play is resuming. In most cases these have been removed except where musical interludes dictated they remain.

The full audio recordings, squeals, pauses and all, are available on request. Orson Welles’s introductions, which are occasionally minor masterpieces in themselves, have been kept. For some plays there is no introduction, the introduction has been lost, or it involves some form of generic network advertising, in which case they have been removed. It wasn’t easy to decide what to trim, but the guiding principle was to preserve the productions as coherent, self-contained entities, not as historical curiosities for which all form of peculiar interruptions might be deemed more ‘authentic’.

"We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone."