Marcel Marceau wasn't just a mime superstar – he was an unsung war hero
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Something I did not have on my radio bingo card this year was that radio would give me a new appreciation of the silent art of mime. Still, that’s what happened when I listened to Archive on 4: The Art of Silence (Radio 4). This was one of those unforgettable radio programmes that takes a subject that you thought you knew and opens it up, like unfolding a secret treasure map, revealing routes and vistas within it that you’d never known before.
Presented by Marcel Marceau’s two daughters, Camille and Aurélia, The Art of Silence didn’t focus directly on the art of mime performance itself, but on the complex history of the man who brought it to life. Born Marcel Mangel to a Jewish family in Strasbourg in 1923, he adopted the more French-sounding surname “Marceau” during the Nazi occupation of France. And it was this period in European history that was to have the most profound influence on him.
The young Marceau joined the French Resistance at the age of 17 and helped Jewish children to escape the Gestapo by smuggling them into Switzerland. Marceau’s own father was captured in 1944 and murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz. There were so many layers of silence, withdrawal, and things unspoken here, carefully and beautifully pieced together by producer Victoria Ferran.
“Why he chose to be silent is a story he rarely told in public,” said his daughters. Why did Marceau, after the war, commit his life to performing an art form without any speech? A quotation from the man himself helped to explain: “In the silence, you can find wit, tragedy, fun, humour, pathos, comedy.” A spectrum of human emotion that the Nazis had tried so hard to stamp out. But, mostly, it was this: “After the war, there are no words any more.” But Marceau had entrusted his children with his own words, in the form of his written diaries.
A century since his birth, this is the first time that his family is telling his story in English. In fact, the relationship that Marceau had with his family was one of the strongest threads here: from his childhood as part of a large and close-knit bond of cousins and siblings, to the loss of his father, and the later, physical disconnection between Marceau and his own children that came from his work, travelling and performing his famous act for 300 nights each year.
This was really a programme about the Second World War and its long, devastating impact in the years that followed. An audio exploration of a visual artist, what came through most powerfully were the points of pain and solace, felt somewhere deep beneath the senses. Through the story of one extraordinary man and his family, the whole of the last 100 years of art, war and emotion were illuminated.
A less nuanced, but nonetheless cosy, time is being had over at Radio 3 in the run-up to Christmas. Clive Myrie has a new series, broadcast each Sunday in Advent, called Clive Myrie at Christmas. Now, getting BBC News presenters to host classical music programmes is very much the foundation of the Classic FM schedule these days (see: John Humphrys, Zeb Soanes, Moira Stuart, Andrew Marr, Joanna Gosling…), but it’s a relatively new direction for Radio 3, whose new controller, Sam Jackson, joined the BBC from Classic FM earlier this year. And this series certainly has a Classic FM feel: crowd-pleasing pieces, introduced with a relaxing mildness by a highbrow celebrity.
In the most recent episode, Myrie played Vivaldi’s Four Seasons: Winter, and other familiar works by Bach, Mozart, Saint-Saëns and Hans Zimmer. The most interesting and unexpected choice, by a mile, was the fantastically stirring traditional Nigerian Christmas piece, Betelehemu, performed by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. “I guarantee you’ll love this,” Myrie said, just before playing it. And I certainly did. But I’d also have loved to hear more about it: the origins of the piece and the musical and spiritual context in which it sits.
Deeply etched with a war reporter’s painful experience of having to tell true stories of terrible things, Myrie’s voice somehow still always sounds warm, gentle and full of hope; he’s wonderfully suited to radio. And this series is nothing if not comforting: the sort of thing to listen to while having a Sunday afternoon doze under the electric blanket with a mince pie.
But we already have Classic FM for that, don’t we? Isn’t Radio 3 supposed to be a bit more challenging than this? It feels silly to complain about radio that makes you feel too relaxed, but Myrie is now quite rare in being a BBC News presenter with serious intelligence, experience, wit and gravitas who hasn’t yet left the corporation to get paid more at a commercial rival. Radio 3 would do well to make the most of that.
