Rada: A Drama of War in One Act — Context and Discussion

Diction as a Weapon

The soldiers' speech is deliberately coarse and dismissive. Arram tells Rada she should “think yourself damned lucky to be alive,” reducing her grief to an inconvenience. Michael's remark that war “can't be all cakes and cream” is a grotesque understatement that reveals their emotional detachment. Nanko, the half-witted schoolmaster, parrots the phrase “survival of the fittest” with a chilling literalness, turning a scientific concept into a justification for atrocity. Noyes uses these verbal tics to show how language can be twisted to normalize violence.

The Gramophone and the Sacred

The gramophone record, labeled “A Christmas Carol / Sung by the monks of St. Peter's monastery / At midnight mass, on Christmas Eve —ADESTE, FIDELES!”, becomes a central symbol. Nanko accidentally starts it, and the monks' chorus drowns out the distant artillery. The juxtaposition is stark: a mechanical reproduction of sacred music plays over a scene of horror. Noyes does not comment on this irony; he lets the stage directions and Nanko's oblivious dialogue—"These plums are excellent"—carry the weight. The carol's Latin title, meaning "O come, all ye faithful," underscores the absence of faith in the room.

Offstage Violence and Onstage Indifference

The play's most violent action—Rada's suicide and the shooting of her daughter—occurs offstage, heard only as two revolver shots. The soldiers' reaction is immediate self-interest: they flee at a bugle call, leaving Nanko alone. He notices “Something red again. Trickling under the door? Blood, I suppose,” but his primary concern is the gramophone and the plums. Noyes's choice to keep the violence unseen forces the audience to imagine it, while the characters' indifference amplifies the horror. The final image of Nanko dipping his finger in blood and staring with horror as the carol plays is the play's only moment of recognition.

Structure and the Christmas Eve Setting

The play is a single act, compressed into a continuous scene. The Christmas Eve setting is not merely atmospheric; it is a structural device that heightens the contrast between expectation and reality. The eikonostasis with its ever-burning lamp, the firelight, and the mention of midnight mass create a framework of religious ritual that the soldiers' behavior systematically violates. Noyes uses the setting to ask what remains of sacred tradition when war strips away all pretense. The final stage direction—the gramophone drowning out the artillery—leaves the audience with an unresolved dissonance between the carol's promise of peace and the blood on the floor.

Readers should attend to Noyes's use of offstage action and the gramophone as a mechanical chorus. The play does not moralize; it presents a situation and lets the details speak. Pay particular attention to Nanko's dialogue, which often carries the play's thematic weight in its apparent nonsense. The brevity of the work—a single act of about 6,700 words—makes it a concentrated study in dramatic irony and the limits of empathy under duress.

Sometimes a play lingers because of what it doesn't show, like that gramophone carol against the darkness in Noyes’s Rada. It made me recall another script, quieter in its own way, where faith and duty fray at the edges under pressure. There’s a certain ache in both, a wondering about what we carry through war. I found that same haunting quality in Cromwell: A Drama, in Five Acts — A Closer Reading, particularly in its spare, human moments.