Giles Cooper Stannus

Background

Cooper was born in 1918, just outside of Dublin, to Commander Guy Edward Cooper, R.N., a colonial judge, and his wife, Winifred Annette Warren. Cooper was expected to follow in the footsteps of his father’s career in the colonial service.

Education

After attending Lancing College in Sussex, and Grenoble University in France, Cooper went to San Sebastian to study Spanish. There he was wounded, although not seriously, by a stray bullet fired during the civil war being fought there. It’s interesting to speculate that this is perhaps why he enrolled in the Webber-Douglas School of Drama back in London, rather than joining the armed services. Cooper’s acting career was cut short, however, by the outbreak of World War II. Giles was conscripted in August of 1939 and spent four of his seven years in the army in Burma, with the West Yorkshire Regiment.

Career

Cooper started to write plays, without giving up acting. Two plays, Never Get Out and Haddocks’ Eyes, were produced in London in 1950. Unfortunately, any encouragement that Cooper may have felt from this small victory was short-lived, as his next play was considered “a perfectly abominable” second play, according to Albert E. Kalson in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Cooper’s own career blurred the distinctions between high and low art: while his radio and television writing was considered more commercial than his more “serious” plays, he made radio drama an art form.

In the early 1950s, Cooper got wind that the BBC, which was regularly producing about five hundred plays per year, needed writers for radio. Finding that being in demand was a pleasant change from struggling to produce a play for the stage, Cooper took his place on the BBC staff, working with producer-director Donald McWhinnie. Cooper was now prepared to give up his acting career for good. He still hoped to return to writing plays, considering radio a faddish, ephemeral media. Yet his work helped to make the 1950s the BBC’s golden age of radio drama.

Cooper’s trademark was a focus on the dark underbelly of everyday life. One of Cooper’s most original radio plays is Unman, Wittering, and Zigo (1958), in which students at a boys’ school try to wrest authority from a new schoolmaster by claiming that they have murdered his predecessor. Inspired by William Golding’s 1955, the novel The Lord of the Flies and seeking to suggest that evil is learned, not innate, the play was originally set at an army camp.

In Mathry Beacon (1956), another of Cooper’s most acclaimed radio plays, several members of the army, both male and female, go to guard a machine in a part of Wales, where, against the background sound of the machine’s dull, lulling sound, they establish a utopian community. Greed eventually shatters their community, and the surviving members return to the outside world. Cooper also treated materialism, war, and technology in The Object (1964), which was the winner of the Czech International Prize for Radio Drama. Other successful radio dramas include the surrealistic The Disagreeable Oyster (1957), in which the main character is played by two actors.

Unfortunately, Cooper met with the same death as the parents of the siblings in Happy Family - a railway accident. In between the play’s run at the Hampstead Theatre Club in May 1966, and a brief reprise at St. Martin’s Theatre in March 1967, Cooper apparently stepped off a moving train, mistaking the exit door for the door to the corridor. The verdict was “death by misadventure.”

Achievements

• British playwright Giles Cooper is best known for his radio scripts of the 1950s, with their bleak comic satires of bourgeois values. He wrote nearly fifty radio and television scripts, as well as a dozen plays for the stage. In all three media - radio, television, and theater - he attacked the conventions of the comfortable classes.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Other Man
  • In Conversation with Stuart Sutcliffe
  • Dramascripts: Unman Wittering and Zigo
  • Everything in the Garden
  • Out of the Crocodile: Play

• Other Work

  • Happy Family
  • Six plays for radio.

Views

His focus on the malice and avarice simmering beneath comfortable bourgeois existence won him a place in British cultural history as well as in radio. While he never proposed an alternative to the spiritual vacuum of post-war materialism, making his audience uncomfortable certainly had its own political value.

Quotations: “When an idea associates itself with the wrong story, it is usually ... a story that treats it too directly.”

Personality

As in Mathry Beacon and other works, Cooper skillfully builds tension and suspense over the course of the play. Cooper was less in his element in television; he worked so skillfully with voices that radio was a natural medium for him. While the stage, like television, takes some focus off the voice because of the actor's physical presence, the stage allowed more room for complexity, and more opportunity for Cooper’s pessimistic vision of society to unfold, without the hindrance of more conservative television executives.

Connections

In 1947, Cooper married the actress Gwyneth Mary Lewis.

Father:

Guy Edwards

Mother:

Winifred Annette (Warren) Cooper

Wife:

Gwyneth Mary Lewis