Buoyant Billions

Summary

1949 BBC live studio production of George Bernard Shaw’s last full-length play Buoyant Billions, based on Esmé Percy’s recent Malvern Festival production at the Princes Theatre, by arrangement with Roy Limbert.

Theatre play

Buoyant Billions by [George] Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) [more information]

Play synopsis

'Buoyant Billions is a play about nothing and about everything. There is Bill Buoyant, the old millionaire There is his daughter who is discovered in (of all places) a jungle hut playing (of all things) a saxophone by way of charming snakes. There is the young man out to better the world. There is a cool and patronising native. And there is talk, talk, talk-about life and death and the hereafter and politics and economics and money and the present chaos of the world’ (Lionel Hale, ‘Away with the Drawing Room’, Radio Times, 4 November 1949, p. 45).

Production history

Shaw’s last full-length play, written 1946-1948, presented at the Malvern Festival in 1949.

Date of transmission

Monday 14 November 1949

Time

9.00-10.45pm

Channel

BBC Television

Production company

BBC

Credits

Presented for Television by

Kevin Sheldon

Presented for the stage by

Esmé Percy

Playwright

[George] Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

Sets / Settings

Theodora Winsten

Cast

Peter Bartlett	Fiffy
Peggy Burt	Mrs Thirdborn
Denis Cannan	The Widower
Sylvia Coleridge	Mrs Secondborn
Frances Day	She
Jasmine Dee	Darkie
Donald Eccles	His father
Denholm Elliott	Junius
Arthur Hewlett	The Chinese Priest
John Longden	Sir Ferdinand Flopper
Kenneth Mackintosh	The Native
Maitland Moss	Old Bill Buoyant
Dermot Walsh	Mr Secondborn

Additional details

Origination

Live from studio

Vision original

Monochrome

Extant status

No archival copy is known to exist.

Print sources

Title

Radio Times, 11 November 1949 (Magazine)

Linking notes

listing, p. 46, article by Lionel Hale, ‘Away with the Drawing Room’, p. 45; photograph, p. 44