Radio Drama Review: ‘The Hand’ by Guy de Maupassant

by Laura Lai/Review

While I was trying to decide on which radio drama to listen in English, I came across the play ‘A Slight Ache’ by Harold Pinter, the British dramatist awarded in 2005 the Nobel Prize for Literature. I will definitely review it for next month, because my attention was caught by a shorter radio play (approx. 25 minutes) of the French writer Guy de Maupassant: ‘The Hand’.

Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) is known as a short-stories writer and as novelist, and from all his novels for ‘Bel-Ami’, which inspired film directors, too. More than twenty years ago, following a French language contest in which I did very well (as I usually did to all French language contests), one of the books I was ‘awarded’ was the novel ‘Bel-Ami’ by Guy de Maupassant. I wonder how many teenage pupils would study very hard nowadays, for contests in order to win … books. Anyway, the point is that Guy de Maupassant is not known as a dramatist. However, Radio BBC adapted ‘The Hand’ for radio and broadcasted it in 1976, dramatized by Michael Robson and directed by Derek Hoddinott.

            This ‘mysterious and hideous’ story is told by one of the characters, Bermutier, five years after it actually happened. The story is placed at the house of Sir John Rowell, in Corsica in 1880. In his study he holds a human hand that is hold chained because Sir John is convinced that the hand has a life of itself and it can attack; he also keeps it as a bait for whom owns the hand. It actually belonged to a giant (Chavanne) followed by the French troops, caught, shot in his leg and to whom they cut the right hand and gave it to Sir John. Due to the fact that a human hand having its own life and being able to attack sounds like madness, Bermutier conducts an investigation. But his investigation did not show proves of people around Sir John manipulating him into madness. It actually proved that Sir John was having a very loyal servant, Olivier, and a brother living in the UK, who was inheriting Sir John, but who was not hurrying his death or manipulating him into madness, so that he can inherit him sooner. The end of the play is dramatic, ‘mysterious and hideous’, showing that the hand had a life of its own, as Sir John assumed.

Therefore, the first thing that made me listen to this play, was the fact that I was not familiar with Guy de Maupassant as a dramatist and I was curious to listen his play. The second thing that was like an invitation to listen to this play was the picture used when recently uploading it on You Tube (July, 2019): the picture of a hand on a tree. It reminded me of the picture of Honoré de Balzac’s right hand on a paper and his last few words. Balzac is the greatest French realist writer, who died in 1850 – the year of de Maupassant’s birth.

            And I am glad that I could listen to the play ‘The Hand’ by Guy de Maupassant, because I discovered a play in which the author broke Aristotle’s principles of time and space, still remaining so intriguing and so captivating that it was adapted for radio by the BBC itself.