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Ronald Mason (8 September 1926 – 16 January 1997) was a director and producer of drama for the BBC, a BBC executive in his native Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles, the Head of BBC Radio Drama as successor to Martin Esslin and was active in the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). Known universally throughout Irish and British theatrical and broadcasting circles as Ronnie, among the writers Mason championed, Brian Friel perhaps became the most prominent. Mason produced and directed Friel’s earliest plays, ''A Sort of Freedom'' (16 January 1958) and ''To This Hard House'' (24 April 1958), for the BBC Northern Ireland Home Service on radio and later brought Friel’s stage work to the BBC's national neworks. ==Life and works== Ronald Charles Frederick Mason〔(Ronald Mason biography, BBC Comedy and Drama Exhibition )〕 was born in Ballymena, County Antrim, the seventh child of a seventh child in a strongly Protestant community. Among his schoolmates in Ballymena was Ian Paisley, who was to become a major political figure in Unionist politics and a leading anti-Catholic, whom he was later to command to ‘Sit down, Ian’, when the Reverend Paisley began a peroration at the BBC during Mason’s years as the BBC’s Head of Programmes in Northern Ireland. The Reverend Paisley complied. Mason graduated from Queen’s University, Belfast, and began his career teaching English and French in the 1940s. He joined the BBC six years later in 1955 as a radio producer in Belfast, finding a kindred spirit in the novelist, radio producer and broadcaster Sam Hanna Bell against BBC Belfast’s prevailing caution in political matters, standing with Bell as an advocate for the shipyard worker turned controversial playwright, Sam Thompson. After negotiating the treacherous BBC politics in Northern Ireland, successfully bringing new and established writers to the Northern Ireland Home Service and attracting attention in London, he joined BBC Radio Drama in London in 1963. As his successor as Head of Radio Drama, John Tydeman, described it in his obituary in ''The Independent'', "he became executive producer of an innovative new series of 15-minute-long single plays broadcast every weekday evening at 11.45 under the title ''Just Before Midnight''. The series gave great encouragement to new playwrights, including the young Tom Stoppard".〔John Tydeman (Obituary: Ronald Mason, ''The Independent'', 20 January 1997 )〕 Jill Hyem and Brian Friel would be among the other emerging playwrights. His time in London also saw him producing and directing a twenty-hour-long production of Tolstoy’s '' War and Peace '',〔(''War and Peace'', Episode 1, BBC Radio 4, 1969 )〕 bringing plays by Friel to national prominence and directing work from Eugene O’Neill, Marguerite Duras and Christopher Hampton. During forays into television in the 1960s, he produced ''The Randy Dandy'',〔(''The Randy Dandy'', BBC Television, 1961, ''Radio Times'' )〕 by Stewart Love, ‘the Irish John Osborne’, and was director for the six-part series ''Here Lies Miss Sabry''〔(''Here Lies Miss Sabry'', final episode BBC TV, 1960, ''Radio Times'' )〕>, starring Sebastian Shaw, produced by Dennis Vance and written by Raymond Bowers. He also oversaw a series of new plays called ''Double Image'', among which he produced Tom Stoppard’s British television debut, ''A Separate Peace''〔(Tom Stoppard, ''A Separate Peace'', BBC Television, 1966, IMDb )〕 in 1966 . His radio production of Friel’s play ''The Loves of Cass McGuire'' in August 1969 preceded the Broadway premiere by two months and the Dublin premiere at the Abbey Theatre the following year. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Ronald Mason (drama)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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