A Leap in the Dark review – hilarious recreation of the BBC’s first radio drama

‘Swaggering panache’: Robert Pickavance, Suzanne Ahmet and Ben Norris in A Leap in the Dark. Photograph: Andrew Billington

In the early 1920s, the British Broadcasting Company, forerunner of today’s corporation, is smugly enjoying its monopoly of the airwaves. Not everyone, though, is happy. Lady Hartley’s firm produces wireless sets. Sales are slow: the “stuck-up idiots” at the BBC are churning out classical music. “Palestrina!” Who will buy radios to listen to “rubbish like that”? Lady Hartley (Angela Bain – feisty to the max) thwacks her umbrella on the desk of the organisation’s unfortunate representative, Cedric Maud (Perry Moore) – Oxbridge-entitled but middle-manager uncertain. Manufacturers, she declares, want something new.

A Leap in the Dark is a comic commemoration of that “something new”: the first radio drama. It’s the brainwave of Maud’s assistant, Grace Gumby (Alyce Liburd), combating sexist discrimination with wit and grace. As director, she proposes Nigel Playfair (Andrew Pollard, in fine actor-manager style), whose Ibsen with oil drums has been such a success at the Lyric Hammersmith; as writer, she suggests the young, idealistic Richard Hughes (Ben Norris) – wild-haired, passionate, intractable.