Writing refugees into television history

Against the odds: A life in writing

When the Second World War broke out, Lehman, at the age of 13, fled Poland with his Jewish parents. They travelled through Romania and Italy and spent the beginning of the war in hiding in France. When it got too dangerous in Vichy France, Lehman’s family moved again, finding their way across the Pyrenees and into Franco’s non-belligerent Spain. There they were put in a refugee centre where the family was split and Lehman was separated from his mother. He and his father stayed in Spain until British boats were sent to pick up refugees. In March 1943, Lehman entered the United Kingdom as a refugee (Lejman, 2013) (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Passport photograph of Leo Lehman (courtesy of the Lehman family).

Lehman spoke no English when he arrived in Britain, but in his early 20s gained a degree in English from Southampton University. Soon afterwards, he took a postgraduate degree at the University of London, where he met his wife Elizabeth; they married in 1952 (Lejman and Coulson, 2013; Writers’ Guild of Great Britain).

Lehman taught French in a London school but began writing plays in his spare time. When the Arts Council awarded him a bursary, he completed three plays that would lay the foundations for his later recognition as a playwright. Soon afterwards, he was invited to write for television and became a regular contributor.

Two of his first plays, ‘Epitaph’ (BBC, Sunday Night Theatre, tx. 27/05/1956) and ‘Who Cares?’ (BBC, Sunday Night Theatre, tx. 15/09/1957), saw success on the stage and were also adapted for BBC television. ‘Epitaph’ was initially produced by Henry Sherek, a British theatrical manager best known for producing the plays of T.S. Eliot. Little other information about this stage production seems to survive, but what is revealing is that Sherek seemed to share Lehman’s European outlook: He was fluent in German and French, having been educated in Germany and Switzerland. ‘Epitaph’s’ narrative structure anticipates Lehman’s subsequent work: the story starts in London in 1954 and then unfolds in five different cities (Berlin, Barcelona, Moscow, Warsaw and New York) from 1934 to 1964 ( Radio Times, 1956a). The television adaptation was produced and directed by Alvin Rakoff with whom Lehman worked on several occasions. Rakoff had a long television career, but when he started in the early 1950s, he too must have felt an outsider to British society and culture: he was born in Canada and his parents were originally from Ukraine and Russia.

‘Who Cares?’ is part of a tradition which Peter Billingham calls ‘theatre of conscience’. One major exponent is the Century Theatre, Britain’s oldest surviving travelling theatre, created after the Second World War, to take theatre to cities that had been destroyed and where facilities were very poor. As Billingham argues, this was a radical, non-elitist and nonconformist approach to theatre and theatre-going which offered a unique alternative in an industry that ‘was the depressingly familiar territory of middle-class audiences supporting what was almost exclusively an unchallenging, bourgeois cultural activity’ (2002: 139). Century Theatre selected Lehman’s play to perform alongside works by Shakespeare, Molière, Thackeray, Ibsen and Chekhov, touring across the country between 1952 and 1957. ¹ Its television adaptation was produced and directed by Chloe Gibson, a figure who belonged to the elite of the West End theatre world in the late 1940s and went on to have a long and prolific TV career. In the mid-1950s, Lehman was able to give up teaching and make a living as a playwright, principally because of the income earned through writing for West German television.

Lehman’s breakthrough into British television and theatre was all the more remarkable, given the initial difficulties of his personal circumstances. Just over 10 years after his arrival in the United Kingdom, Lehman was well known among the elite of the British theatre world and he gradually managed to get more work for television as well. He was, however, particularly hurt by the fact that he was blacklisted in his home country of Poland, because his plays had been labelled anti-communist (Lejman, 2013).

As his personal life had been drastically affected by Nazism, Lehman seemed resistant to allying himself with any political ideology. His work shows that he was deeply a political writer, but his interest was in a kind of humanitarian politics. His scripts always come back to the idea of freedom and dignity, and his characters constantly wrestle with questions of morality, compromise, betrayal and divided loyalties. Lehman returned to these concerns throughout his writing career, often using his own biographical experience as a way of making sense of his own life and the course of post-war European history.

Refugees on post-war television

The refugee crisis, initially caused by the war, remained acute after the Hungarian refugee flow in 1956; UN aid and funds proved insufficient to help the thousands of European refugees in need of resettlement, as well as over 1 million Palestine-Arab refugees in the Middle East, Chinese in Hong Kong and White Russian in China and Hong Kong. It was in this context that Britain proposed the idea of a WRY from 1959 to 1960. The idea was first put forward in 1958 by four Britons: Timothy Raison, Christopher Chataway, Colin Jones and Trevor Philpott, members of the Conservative Party’s Bow Group. Next it was taken up officially by the British government and approved by the UN General Assembly. The main objectives of WRY were to increase general awareness of refugee problems and encourage governments, private groups and individuals to make special efforts to find solutions (Read, 1962: 27–28). The ensuing campaign made full use of the media – press, radio, television, cinema and the theatre – in furthering its aim of raising awareness of the plight of refugees. Posters with WRY symbols papered public buildings, and Britain adopted the symbol of ‘The Open Hand’ (Holborn, 1975: 450–454).

The figure of the Eastern European refugee as a voiceless victim rescued by the generosity of Western powers dominated British television at the time. In television documentary, the BBC led the media campaign for refugees. One of their first documentaries highlighting the plight of refugees in Europe and the Middle East was ‘The Waiting People’, part of the BBC’s The World is Ours series (1954–56), produced by Norman Swallow in collaboration with the United Nations (UN). Inherent in the series’ claim to ‘purposeful television’ was its direct link with the documentary film tradition: The World is Ours was initiated by Paul Rotha, and sprang from the post-war films, The World is Rich (Rotha, 1947) and World Without End (Basil Wright and Rotha, 1953; Swallow, 1956: 54–55; The World is Ours, 1954).

‘The Waiting People’ was broadcast twice, on 8 October 1954 and 25 November 1954, as the producers were keen to raise awareness of the UN High Commission for Refugees’ new Camp Adoption Scheme in the United Kingdom. ² The scheme was designed to enlist local support for refugees living in camps, by establishing some real personal contacts between them and people in Britain and elsewhere (Alexander, 1953). To this end, the programme’s presentation of the UN’s official lines of policy and UNHCR officers’ direct address for help to the viewers intersected with images of squalid, damp compartments in refugee camps. ‘The Waiting People’ fulfilled its ambitions: There were letters asking for the personal addresses of individual refugees named in the programme, and a considerable sum of money was received, as well as about half a dozen offers to adopt refugee children (Swallow, 1953). The programme locates the post-war refugee problem mainly in Europe, with heart-rending images of Eastern European refugees suffering from sickness and infection which, as the voice-over underlines, can be countered only with aid from the UN, voluntary agencies or individuals, and ‘the freedom the West said it had to offer’.

‘The Waiting People’ was one of the first documentaries to contribute to a media campaign for European refugees that gained momentum from 1956 onwards, when the influx of refugees from Eastern Europe increased. BBC Radio joined in this effort with the first of its special programmes to mark the UN campaign on behalf of refugees throughout the world. The Radio Times published a feature about the plight of ‘the millions of homeless people’, accompanied by photographs of refugee families and children, urging readers to offer help to ‘the victims of that widespread malignant virus of our time, political confusion’ (Radio Times, 1956b).

Part of this campaign was the documentary, Out (BBC, tx. 13/2/1957), which presents a more personalised story of the European refugee problem. Produced for the UN Department of Public Information by the highly respected film director Thorold Dickinson, Out considered the reception of the Hungarian émigrés in a refugee camp in Austria and their hopes for emigration and resettlement. This is conveyed through the story of a Hungarian working-class widow and her two boys and how they coped with ‘the corrosion of idleness and of years of waiting in a camp’ ( Radio Times, 1957).

In 1959, emphasis was given to the role of the UK Committee for WRY as ‘the co-ordinating force behind Britain’s efforts to help towards ending the misery and frustration suffered by millions of refugees’ ( Radio Times, 1959). The WRY UK Committee counted on the support of the BBC ‘so that in the last months of this WRY we can make sure of an outstanding British contribution to humanity’ (WRY UK Committee, 1960). It was within this context that the documentary film, Mission to No Man’s Land, was written and produced by Stanley Wright, Assistant Head of the UN Films Division; it was shown on BBC three times in 1960 (tx. 13/1, 26/10 and 21/12/1960). The Hollywood film star, Yul Brynner, was chosen to report on a visit to two refugee camps. Brynner walks among the refugees and talks to them, but very little is heard of their voices. Instead, close-ups of the distressed faces of adult and child refugees emphasise their desperation after years of waiting in the camp. The programme makes sure to highlight the positive impact made by UN help in the form of financing housing projects for refugees. ITV’s The Unwanted (tx. 27/11/1959) appears similar in its structure and tone. Its producer and co-scriptwriter, Caryl Doncaster, along with Huw Thomas, gives an on-the-spot report from refugee camps in Austria, Hong Kong and the Middle East. The presenters’ aim was to show ‘something of the grim, harrowing lives of the refugees, whom we in Britain are trying to help’ (Doncaster, 1959: 6). These documentaries portrayed refugees as recipients of aid, with an emphasis on their helplessness and despair. Their discourse of victimhood appealed to Western charitable sentiments and established the moral and political superiority of the West.

In drama, there are a few examples to help us contextualise Lehman’s work, but little information about them survives. For example, the issue of refugees waiting to be released from the camps of Europe was the subject of Uncertain Mercy (1958), a play written by Dorothy Wright and produced by Victor Menzies. Set in a displaced persons camp in Austria in 1956, Uncertain Mercy broadly follows the structure of the BBC/UN missionary documentaries discussed above: it presented ‘a compelling picture of the tragedy and misery that can arise in such a camp, which nevertheless owes its very existence to the qualities of kindness and mercy’ ( Radio Times, 1958a).

Troy Kennedy Martin’s adaptation of the stage play The Price of Freedom (1960) by John Heron and Maureen Quiney was part of the campaign to promote WRY. Kennedy Martin presented it as the story of ‘the loveless and lepers of our modern political society’ in a refugee camp of Europe (1960: 14). It is worth noting that it was produced by Naomi Capon, one of the earliest female directors of British television. The presence in the cast of several ex-refugees added authenticity and served to confirm Britain’s role as a safe haven. Reactions to the play varied considerably. For some viewers, ‘it clearly showed the tragedy of life in those surroundings and gave proper credit to those trying to help them’ (Audience Research Report, 1960). Others felt strongly that ‘this subject did not provide them with good Sunday evening entertainment, it was too morbid’ and complained of the portrayal of characters in ‘the depth of utter despair and immorality’, something that ‘would do little good for the cause of the refugees’ (ARR, 1960).

Another contribution to WRY was People of Nowhere (1961), originally a theatre play by James Brabazon, commissioned by the Dominicans of Hawkesyard Priory. The setting is a derelict church, once an army ammunition dump and now part of a refugee camp somewhere in the British zone of West Germany in 1945. The play was produced by John Crockett and recorded in All Saints’ Church in Surrey, described as ‘a disused church rich in visual detail that enhances and contrasts with the lives and circumstances of the refugees in the play’ ( Radio Times, 1961). It tells the story ‘not of the whole refugee problem but of one ordinary family caught in circumstances not of their own making but of the making of history’ ( Radio Times, 1961). Responses to the play were mixed. Those who habitually recoiled from such uncomfortable subjects in television drama felt it was ‘more than time these were given a rest’ (Audience Research Report, 1961). In their view, the play had no value beyond that of inducing a mood of depression in the face of such a desperate dilemma, which they considered more suitable for documentary treatment than for presentation in dramatic form. Fewer were those who thought that the play had done a service as a reminder of the sorrows of refugees and that it presented ‘these unfortunates not as a huge mass of beings but as individuals deserving of proper lives and homes as we are’ (ARR, 1961).

Lehman on home, belonging and memory

Lehman’s TV plays are concerned with the politics of asylum and refugeedom at a humanitarian, personal level. The agency and self-determination of his characters stand out when compared to other contemporary TV representations of the refugee problem. His dramas are a mixture of pre-war and post-war narratives of the refugee experience not previously seen on British television. The relative openness of the television industry in the 1950s and 1960s created the space in which new, original drama was born. For example, Michael Barry, Head of BBC Drama from 1952 to 1961, was, as Asa Briggs says, ‘pushing the margins of tolerance and encouraging writers and producers with questioning minds’ (1995: 192). At the same time, the arrival of ITV in 1955 and the increasing popularity of television in general meant that the London-centric and middle-class bias of the BBC was increasingly exposed. From early on, ITV attracted new writers to television, and the example of its series, Armchair Theatre (1956–74), is often cited as one that exemplified the ‘creative drive’ that spilled over into other ITV drama anthologies such as Associated-Rediffusion’s Television Playhouse (1967–83) and Granada’s Play of the Week (1955–74). All three were hugely popular and have been associated with the ‘golden years’ of ITV drama (Sendall, 1982: 339, 345). It is within this context that Lehman managed to get his scripts onto the small screen and become a regular contributor to both BBC and ITV’s prestigious drama anthologies.

However, Lehman’s stories of hardship and politics often sat uneasily with some viewers – perhaps unsurprisingly, given that BBC’s single plays at this time were overwhelmingly adaptations of classic theatre and literature (Caughie, 2000: 38). Lehman’s ‘Who Cares?’ (Sunday Night Theatre, 1957), for example, deals with the troubles of people behind the Iron Curtain: it is the story of a Polish refugee (played by Denholm Elliott) with a smuggled Anglo-Saxon manuscript and how his arrival in Britain affects the family of a university professor. Audience research reports suggest that the play was seen as not only ‘confusing and torpid’ but also ‘heavy-going for a Sunday evening viewing’, which one housewife thought needed ‘something bright to build us up for the coming week’ (Audience Research Report, 1957).

More is known about ‘Thirty Pieces of Silver’ (Television Playwright, tx. 26/8/1958) which was directed and produced by Patrick Dromgoole and tells the story of Anna Weiss (played by Joan Miller) who comes to England from Germany after losing her husband in a Nazi concentration camp. Having settled in London as a cleaner for almost 20 years, Anna refuses to claim the compensation money due to her from the West German government for her personal loss and suffering ( Radio Times, 1958b). The play was considered highly effective, and several viewers said that it had given them a vivid insight into ‘an isolated case of suffering that had to be endured through the folly of mankind’ (Audience Research Report, 1958). Nevertheless, to many the play seemed confusing and the choice of the subject was thought ‘unusual for a television play’ (ARR, 1958). This is a revealing response, given that ‘Thirty Pieces of Silver’ was one of first Lehman’s scripts written specifically for television – its specifically televisual identity reinforced by the casting of one of Britain’s earliest ‘TV personalities’, Miller (best known as ‘Picture Page Girl’ for her appearance in Cecil Madden’s pioneering magazine programme, Picture Page) as Anna.

At the heart of ‘Thirty Pieces of Silver’ is a recurring concern in Lehman’s work: the burden of memory and history and their role in making sense of one’s life. For Anna, the question of whether to accept the compensation money is a moral one; saying yes could spoil the memories of her happy family life back in Hanover. Furthermore, she knows that her husband would never have accepted it. Defending her decision against the pressure applied by the solicitor (Arnold Marlé), her son (Clifford Elkin) and her employer (Leonard Sachs), Anna cries out:

I spit on the Nazi money. It’s blood money. Black smoke rose to the sky, and now pennies are clattering down, and everybody’s running, running. But that’s not manna, I tell you. It’s ashes.

Nobody agrees with her or can understand her logic. Her employer Mr Hammeker and her friend Vera have both accepted this money, and they try to convince Anna that there is nothing wrong in having a bit of an easier life after such hardship and pain.

In an unexpected turn of events, Anna is forced to reconsider her decision as her husband comes back from the dead: he managed to escape from the concentration camp and ended up in Brazil. He visits Anna in London and tries to persuade her that he did his best to trace her during the first years, sending her letters but receiving no response. Anna remains unconvinced and insists on knowing what he has come for. When it is revealed, the truth shakes her beliefs and ideals to the core: he needs her to give him their marriage certificate to prove that he is eligible to receive compensation money from the West German government. After this, Anna decides not only to accept the money herself but also to go on a trip to the Italian Riviera and marry Hammeker who had always been fond of her. In a moment of self-reflection, she tells her son’s fiancée:

It was just a dream I had. I am a dogged old crone. I like to hold on with my teeth. Everything has become extremely clear to me in the last few hours. I think women should stick together. I think men should be left to it; let them get on with it: ideas, morality. They invent all these things, we get caught….

Anna’s story is not so much about the political reasons behind the forced dispersal of a huge number of people after the war, but rather the frail, materialistic nature of people’s ideals at times of crisis and vulnerability; in Anna’s words, ‘when your body gets battered, your ideals just fly out of the window’.

Lehman’s ‘A Reason for Staying’, (The Sunday-Night Play, tx.5/3/1961) seems similarly to explore the gap between idealised memories of the homeland and reality. Directed and produced by Alvin Rakoff, the play tells the story of a group of Eastern European exiles living in England, hoping one day to return to their homeland. However, when they receive a visitor from home, ‘the real strength of the ties they formed with their adopted country is shown’ (Radio Times, 1961b). The presence of theatre and film stars, like Anthony Quayle and Denholm Elliott, may have made the play more attractive to viewers who might otherwise have regarded this as another heavy-going story about exile and conflicting ideas of freedom.

Similar questions are explored in ‘Freedom in September’ (ITV, 1962). Here, Lehman turns his attention to those regular 1960s news items, which announced that yet another Russian visitor had resolved to make his home in Britain, and asked for political asylum. Lehman is not concerned with the famous – like dancer Rudolf Nureyev – whose welcome was assured, but with an ordinary citizen. ‘For these people who are welcome but not particularly wanted by anyone, the difficulties are much greater’, Lehman explained. ‘Lecherenko in my play is a man like this. He knows that if he stays he will be alone in a strange country. He must abandon the life he has known – the good things as well as the bad’ (Lehman).

Lecherenko (Joseph Furst) is a composer who comes to London as a member of a Russian cultural delegation. He suddenly disappears from the hotel where he is staying, seeking solitude so that he can decide whether to stay or go home. He wanders through London trying to contact people he has met and known in Russia. In the hope of finding a publisher for one of his compositions, a quartet that he knows would fall foul of his own country’s strict censorship laws, he first visits Stewart (Griffith Jones), an English composer. He also tracks down an old friend, Paul Dornik (Alan MacNaughton), who, as a Russian exile, has himself been faced with the same agonising decision.

Shot in a studio and directed by Joan Kemp-Welch, the play conveys the tension of an environment that suppresses freedom of thought and expression. This is evident from the opening scene, in the reception of the hotel where Lecherenko is staying. The space is small and enclosed, but Kemp-Welch’s mobile camera work gives us a sense of a busy and hectic atmosphere: phones are constantly ringing, people come and go, while the presence of a black-suited man in the background of every frame is a reminder that they are all being watched. The camera follows the head of the Russian delegation, Lomov (Martin Sterndale), who tries to keep calm when a journalist named Prince (Patrick Troughton) asks him about the mysterious disappearance of Lecherenko. Presented in a shot/reverse shot sequence, the conversation between the two men emphasises the great lengths to which both go to find out what the other really knows. Lomov insists that Lecherenko is resting in his room, while Prince jokes about the circumstances under which he met Lecherenko: ‘In Moscow, two years ago…. It was under a table…’, he says, adding that ‘it’s alright, it was an official party’.

We are first introduced to a rather docile-looking Lecherenko in the next sequence when he visits a cafe and is befriended by the waitress, Ivy (Amanda Barrie). There too, Lecherenko and Ivy are being watched by the cafe manageress whose reflection we can see in the mirror by the table where Lecherenko is having his cup of tea. The use of mirrors here is in line with the mise en scène of the previous sequence; even in such a seemingly relaxed setting such as that of a cafe, people are constantly being observed. The conversation between Ivy and Lecherenko is awkward at moments, too. Lecherenko disputes Ivy’s claim that in Russia, ‘usually they don’t let the people mingle with tourists’, and when she expresses her surprise that ‘he’s around on his own like this’, he categorically replies, ‘I’m a free person’. This line of dialogue is the first one in a series of similar conversations in which Lecherenko becomes increasingly frustrated at the realisation of how cynical or politically ignorant Western conceptions of life behind the Iron Curtain could be. This is underlined in his next encounter with an English composer, Stewart.

Stewart’s luxury apartment, with its grand piano and expensive furniture, immediately establishes a different social environment, where privilege supposedly allows for freedom of speech and sophistication of thought. We enter the room as Stewart dictates to his secretary that ‘the International Copyright Agreement does not guarantee protection in countries behind the Iron Curtain’. Stewart welcomes Lecherenko to his flat but is keen to make clear he is not a ‘political animal’ and that ‘any intelligent man is politically neutral’. Present also is Stewart’s friend Bowen (Seymour Green), who joins in the conversation, comparing the job of a musician in the West and in the Soviet Union: ‘You may have to contend with political pressures, but in the West it’s a different kettle of fish. As an artist, you are at least sponsored by the state, we are ignored by the state! We belong nowhere at all here’. Later on, Bowen’s views on individual freedom and the role of the state become more politically explicit. Dismissing Boris Pasternak’s novel, Doctor Zhivago, for being ‘a political book, not a literary book’, he condemns what he calls ‘all those Russian boys who choose freedom’ but whose real motive, as he claims, is ‘to have an easier life in the West’.

Lecherenko is clearly uncomfortable hearing all these but he remains silent. He even tries to cover up his own intentions of moving to England. He does not, however, censor himself because he is afraid of openly discussing his views about his country; rather, he finds himself disillusioned by patronising Western views on what freedom might mean to people behind the Iron Curtain, and by people’s inability to empathise and listen to his experiences. Joseph Furst, the Austrian-born actor who plays Lecherenko, conveys the character’s feelings of alienation and disenchantment in a subtle but powerful performance. Furst’s role here is rather different from the suave, villainous characters (usually Eastern European scientists) with which television audiences were later to associate him in series, such as The Saint (1962–69) and Doctor Who (1963–).

Joan Kemp-Welch’s direction complements the theme and concerns of the play. The spy thriller’s mise en scène supports the script’s preoccupation with Cold War politics and espionage. Men in black suits follow Lecherenko wherever he goes and phones ring each time he makes a contact and visits someone. The exterior scenes of night-lit passages, even though they are shot in a studio, create an atmosphere of paranoia and secrecy and underline Lecherenko’s psychological and physical entrapment.

Most of the action, however, takes place in rather familiar (cafe, hotel reception) and domestic settings, but these too are used in a way that underscores the play’s political concerns. For example, on several occasions, characters discuss politics and ideas of freedom over cups of tea, yet all they can do is move anxiously within the confines of the room they are in. The theatricality and ‘drawing-room’ aesthetic that characterised a lot of television drama in this period serves here as a commentary on the play’s key preoccupations: the gap between effecting (political) change and talking about it as well as the divergence between Eastern and Western conceptions of freedom.

These issues come to a climax in a scene when journalist Prince, having spent a whole day looking for Lecherenko, finally secures an interview with him while hiding him in his poky office. Prince’s expectations of getting clear-cut answers to his questions are soon crushed as he realises that Lecherenko cannot give him the answers that would make a ‘good story’ for headline news. ‘Are you seeking political asylum in this country?’ ‘Do you believe in communism?’ Prince asks, and he even offers Lecherenko a generous amount of money to tempt him to speak. His answer confuses Prince even more and is a fine exposé of Lehman’s thinking on political asylum:

This is not a game for me. It is a matter of great thought and hesitation. I’m not a reactionary, I’m not in love with another woman, I have enough to eat. [….] It is not a political decision, not subjectively, objectively yes. I mean that other people will think it is a political decision but it is a matter of dignity. […] There are no communists, Russians, Americans, there are only people, trying to live and not to die. It is not that communism takes away the right to think, it could not. It takes away the will to think. It imposes a lie so big that it takes away the reason to resist. It reduces life to a conspiracy of lies about the human condition. There is silence not because you cannot speak but because it is irrelevant. There are no ideas greater than people.

Lehman revisited ideas of home and belonging in his ‘The East Wind’ (tx. 15/11/1966), a play about two Polish refugees, Konarski (Robert Lang) and Zauber (Lee Montague), settling in London after the war. Produced and directed by Cecil Clarke and Graham Evans, two of the pillars of ITV’s popular Play of the Week in the 1960s, ‘The East Wind’ had originally been written for the theatre, but for reasons unknown to the author, it was first broadcast on television in 1966 and, a year later, had its first staging at the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Centre in Manhattan. The action of the play ranges over 21 years and four continents, but principally it is set in a delicatessen shop in London which the two Polish friends are running together. They come from the same small Polish town, and after years of separation, they meet by chance on the Finchley Road. One has come there via Siberia, North Africa and the Italian Front; the other by way of Marseilles and a concentration camp.

Casting Lee Montague as Zauber reflected the play’s international concerns. Montague, who became a close friend of Lehman’s family, is of a Lithuanian mother and a Polish father. His parents met on board a ship to England in 1906 and Montague grew up in East London among a polyglot Jewish community (Connor, 1966). Montague exemplifies an international, and more specifically, Eastern European identity and culture that had been a part of British society well before Second World War. His work for television is wide-ranging, but he often played foreign roles: ‘In other TV plays I have seen him as a Spanish bullfight critic, a Cypriot schoolteacher, an Italian-American soldier, a Chinese diplomat and a Japanese warrior’, wrote Philip Connor, adding that ‘he can pass as Oriental or Slavonic or Latin, playing bizarre characters, not as stock comic figures or heavies, but as flesh and blood persons with the strengths and weaknesses of real people’ (1966). Montague’s roles are a reminder of the diversity of output on British television, and his career deserves more attention.

Montague’s character, Zauber, wants to go to America or Australia; Konarski is constantly on the move too. Neither can settle. The play tells in flashbacks of the disillusionments and depressions the two have suffered since the war as they tried to make a new life in a new country. Zauber wants to go somewhere where, as he says, ‘nobody knows me’. Konarski, who had suffered as a German prisoner for three weeks, and who survived by eating grass and boot polish, finally kills himself in the back of the shop – and his spirit returns to tell Zauber that heaven is just like their Polish village and that ‘we are all refugees’.

At the moment when Konarski is considering suicide in his search for God, Zauber reacts with exasperation and sarcasm: ‘They fished you out of the sea, out of Asia, Africa and now…now you want God as well. No, there are limits to what people can do for you’. As one critic observed, ‘No writer I know can move so lightly from the serious to the comic, can balance the sad undertone of melancholy in a funny line with light ripple of wit in a serious tone’. She continued, ‘Lehman looks at us with gentle irony and compassionate detachment. He has a musician’s ear for speech and the meanings that lurk under inconsequential talk’ (Frick, 1966).

Talk in ‘The East Wind’ moves from the trivial and the everyday (food and eating habits) to the big, existential questions (life, death) and the political philosophies and systems of the time (imperialism, socialism, Stalinism). Konarski and Zauber debate but their talk is fragmented, their sentences often remain unfinished. A lot of their talk is recounting and processing memories that have left deep psychological and mental marks, and so talking is a process of working through their trauma. The structure of the narrative itself is chaotic and restless, taking us from one continent and one decade to another as the characters remember, recount and dream.

Lehman saw ‘The East Wind’ as ‘a journey without a destination’ (Wall Street Journal, 1967). This open-ended way of storytelling is a recurring trope in the plays discussed here, evident in narrative structure, plot development and characterisation. Consider ‘The East Wind’s’ non-linear structure. The disruptions to the chronology of the narrative are manifestations of the trauma suffered by the characters. Chronology is shaped by their retrospections and acts of remembering, which, by being incoherent, distort the play’s temporality; the past slips in and out, is meant to move. Characters face their traumas as a crisis of temporality.

‘Freedom in September’ provides another example of characters and plot affected by trauma. At the heart of the story, Lecherenko is a wanderer who moves from one place to another in a desperate attempt to find answers to his questions. His restlessness destabilises the plot; we do not know what he is looking for and even when we find out, it is too late for Lecherenko. He is exhausted by his encounters; he cannot decide where ‘home’ should be. Lecherenko exemplifies what Paul Ricoeur writes about narrative and identity: ‘the crisis of identity of the character is reflected in the crisis of the plot’ (1991: 78).

Anna in ‘Thirty Pieces of Silver’ also wrestles with questions of self-dignity and trauma. Her family’s forced displacement has marked her whole outlook. It is only when her past comes back to haunt her – as her long-lost husband reappears – that her beliefs are shaken so much that her trauma is faced head-on: she can now get on with her life without feeling guilty; she can, for the first time, leave the past behind. Compared with his others, this play has one of Lehman’s most clearly resolved endings.

Conclusion

Among the range of TV representations of refugees in the 1950s and early 1960s, Lehman’s stories are distinctive; they depart from the dominant image of the passive, almost childlike refugee and his/her association with a discourse of victimhood. Lehman’s characters have no ready-made, clear answers for East or West: they are torn between different conceptions of ‘home’, but they are not voiceless; their own moral principles and dilemmas motivate them, often providing them with the only form of resistance to any system that attempts to silence them.

Lehman’s work testifies to the variety of post-war TV content and the fluid structures of the television industry. In his plays, Lehman often works through the trauma of his family’s forced migration and the scars of a Europe devastated by war and political divisions. His experience of escaping Nazism, as filtered through his writings, was often hard for British audiences to relate to; few British people would have directly experienced the fear and anguish of living under a totalitarian regime. Even so, Lehman’s distinctively European sensibility and very particular life experiences found a home on British television and enriched its output.

The study of individuals can make for revealing history. Lehman’s work reveals the transnational and transmedial dimensions of early British TV history, or how ‘entangled’ that history is. The concept of entanglement, increasingly employed by media historians, can throw light on the various forms and phases of connection, interrelation, flow, transfer or exchange in media history, and, as Marie Cronqvist and Christoph Hilgert put it, reminds us that ‘nations are not, and have never been, discrete and self-contained spaces’ (2017: 132). From a transmedial perspective, Lehman’s work enriches our knowledge of the numerous connections between British theatre and television in this early period. From a transnational perspective, his stories about refugees encouraged the flow of fresh and often unconventional ideas of belonging and identity. At the same time, they made British television more European in content and outlook. Lehman’s parallel TV career in West Germany adds another layer of questions which are part and parcel of transnational research projects and collaborations. Was there any kind of exchange between Lehman’s work for British and West German television, and if so, what form did it take? For example, how many of his plays were translated or transferred from one country to another? And what could this exchange tell us about these two different national broadcasting systems and their cultures? This kind of research can be undertaken only in multilingual and multinational contexts. It is fascinating, though, that the work of one individual can trigger such criss-crossing research. As Lehman’s Lecherenko insists, ‘there are no ideas greater than people’.