Review: Dear Writer by Jane Rogers

Ten year old Polly and a 79 year old author write to each other, with the girl demanding a new book in the writer's fantasy series. But the writer, taking care of the farm house left to her by her recently deceased brother, is suffering from writer's block.

Things aren't quite what they seem: Polly's antique advice to "make up the fire" and "switch on the wireless" sits awkwardly with her more modern language, and it's soon clear that Polly is "Paula"'s younger self.

Through a series of remembered incidents, the writer pulls us deeper into her early family life, and begins to peel away the layers of defence that she's developed since running away from home so long ago. Although we only ever hear two voices, Anna Massey and Leah Verity White bring these episodes vividly to life, with each one reaching closer and closer to the painful truth about Polly/Paula's mother.

The story of the melting doll, hurled into the fire by Polly in anger and confusion at her mother's hysteria, is unsettling and ignites our need to understand the strange dynamics of this big, stressed family.

The past can't be changed, but we can alter the way it affects us in the present. The writer finds a way through the block by imagining the story she can never know: the reason behind her mother's depression. Paradoxically, the breakthrough comes through telling a story that doesn't centre on "you" - that is, herself. It's as if the writer has to get out of her own light in order to see something new. And that something isn't a new story, but a new side to an old story.

I thought I might lose it when both characters (or both aspects of the character) begin to weep at the culmination of the tragic story the writer has created. But the play doesn't leave us at this low, albeit cathartic, moment. In the final part we meet Polly and her siblings in the winter, tracking a snow leopard in the snow, and finding their own footprints magically turned into those of giants.

It's difficult to present an entire world, and people it with real characters, with just two voices and minimal sound effects. But this sparse production is absolutely engaging. We feel as if we have lived through the writer's years of self-blame and self-denial, and the relationship between the young and old Polly never feels artificial or forced. Stirring, satisfying and even suspenseful, this is an excellent example of the intimate, emotional drama that radio can do so well.

Writer ...... Anna Massey

Polly ...... Leah Verity White

Produced by Clive Brill at Pacificus and broadcast on Thursday 13 August 2009 at 14:15 on BBC Radio 4.

Review: The Summer Walking by Iain Finlay MacLeod

Pregnant traveller Catriona takes salmon and pearls from a wild river in Scotland, just as her grandmother Jess did. Times have changed for the "tinks" and the land they travel, but Catriona's connection with nature is strong and instinctive.

She bribes Hassan, an Iranian gamekeeper, for access to the estate where the river runs, causing gaffer Eddie to sack him. Hassan is rescued by grandma Jess, and even learns some traveller skills. Catriona's feckless husband Alec also finds some respect for Hassan.

Both Catriona and Hassan are exiles: Hassan has fled political persecution, and sends money back to his wife and child, while Catriona belongs to a past where the land provided, and independence of spirit was the birthright of all.

The BBc's introduction to the play says that it's "set in the far north of Scotland", but the river in question is the Spey, so we're in the north east. It's good to hear a little of the Doric, which rarely makes it to the airwaves, but dinna fash yersel, there's nae much o it.

I was left confused about where Hassan was heading next. At first, I thought he was going back to Iran, but perhaps he means that he'll stay in Scotland, but suppress his Iranian identity:

Catriona: Where will you go, Hassan?

Hassan: I'll find a quiet place to work, [?] up the coast or the big city south, and maybe hide my other self in case war comes.

This is the only thing I'm needin' clarification on, ken.

Catriona ...... Amy Manson

Jess ...... Ann Louise Ross

Hassan ...... Khalid Laith

Alec ...... Finn Den Hertog

Eddie ...... Jimmy Chisholm

Joan ...... Wendy Seager

Adapted by the author from his stage play The Pearl Fisher (Edinburgh, 2007).

Directed in Glasgow by Kirstine Cameron and broadcast on 12 August 2009 at 14:15 on BBC Radio 4.

Review: The Mouse House by Adrian Penketh

The Mouse House is one of those plays that you immediately want to listen again. It's packed full of ideas and hooks into topical concerns. I wanted to keep stopping the action, and debate with the characters. And that's got to be a good thing, right?

Mike, a bored IT geek on the wrong side of 40 who recites TS Eliot's "Hollow Men" to himself in the lav before heading into yet another PowerPointless meeting, is inspired by a Parisian stunt. In admiration of the group that secretly repaired the clock of the Pantheon in the French capital, Mike plots to mount a fireworks display from the chimneys of Battersea Power Station.

This Banksyan, plinthesque project is progressed at a series of meetings in All Bar One at Leicester Square. We're not told how Mike recruits his expert helpers - a pyrotechnics guru, and a construction guy who can get them into the site - but I'm guessing social media plays a part.

Mike's wife Kate, the incomparable Raquel Cassidy, is as bored and detached as him. They have no kids; they discuss a friend's bulimic daughter; they wonder about getting another dog... And they gently argue about whether they've just eaten fusilli or penne. The dialogue is impressively 2009, right down to one of the gang's pronouncements that "we've reached that point".

But why is Mike doing what he's doing? Mike himself is unsure. He wants to make an anonymous gesture, but then he decides that he should contact the media. Meanwhile, he's recording a long message into a Dictaphone, tracking the progress of the project and his interpretation of its meaning.

Given the (brief) mention of 9/11, and the confessional nature of Mike's audio recording, I couldn't help thinking of the London bombings of 2005. The play doesn't talk directly about physical terrorism, but perhaps the thought processes behind cultural terrorism are not so very different.

The play mentions actual dates: the fireworks are planned for the day I'm writing this review. Coincidentally, I rode on the train past Battersea Power Station yesterday and the area between the building and the river is covered with seats. (There's going to be a display of motorcyle stunts there. ) But somehow I believed the scene where Mike's team make a recce under cover of darkness (encountering no seats) more than the evidence of my own eyes.

This is a challenging play that dares to revisit Eliot's unreal city, and to ask how much progress we've made in bolstering the authenticity of our lives.

Mike ...... Adam Kotz

Kate ...... Raquel Cassidy

Steve ...... Nicholas Gleaves

Will ...... Giles Fagan

Mike's Colleague ...... Stephen Hogan.

Directed by Toby Swift and broadcast on Tuesday 11 August 2009 at 14:15 on BBC Radio 4.

Review: Bearing the Cross by Ken Blakeson

Three soldiers awarded Victoria Crosses for their bravery at the Battle of Rorke's Drift meet up at a ceremony twenty years later. The action at Rorke's Drift is sketched in via its dramatic recreation in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, which is wowing late nineteenth century audiences at Earls Court in London.

However, most of the play is given up to discussions between the veterans and the landlord and barmaid of the pub in which they meet. The landlord is hostile towards the former redcoats, articulating the idea that soldiers are simply pawns in the capitalistic or imperialist plot - but his real animus is quickly revealed to be his own loss of a brother at an earlier, and perhaps more significant, engagement with the Zulu forces.

Soldier William Jones then becomes the mouthpiece for a series of revisionist attitudes to the war, including a respectful reappraisal of the Zulu enemy's motivations and cultural practices. All three veterans are suffering from what today we'd call post traumatic stress disorder. There are a couple of overt references to the most famous British military cock-up of the century, the Charge of the Light Brigade, and the characters also speculate that Rorke's Drift was spun as a victory to divert attention from the generally poor conduct of the war.

The ordinary soldier's view of this campaign may well have aligned with the story told here, and the characters in the play are indeed based on real people. But the language they use to describe their attitudes feels much too like the language of the twenty-first century, rather than the nineteenth. It's not the vocabulary so much as the construction of their discourse: no one says he's got "issues", for example, but the rhythm of the conversation, and the characters' lack of circumspection, seem utterly wrong for the period. They seem to be informed by a kind of casual acquaintance with psychology, mass media and human rights theory that they couldn't possibly have had.

Every generation uses history to comment on its own period: indeed, history is a form of storytelling, and it therefore tells us as much (and often more) about its authors as its protagonists. We're doubtless meant to find parallels with the conflicts of our own times. But patterns of battle experience repeat up and down the historical timeline: Rorke's Drift may resonate with the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War, and with the current British experience in Afghanistan - but it also echoes every confused or compromised engagement that's ever occured. The ordinary soldier has always been expendable. That's why the main cannon fodder were called the "infantry" - they were the infants.

Perhaps it's interesting that Victorian soldiers could identify what we might think of as modern (or even postmodern) injustices and untruths in a premodern age. If so, there has to be a better way of bringing these points to life than by having a handful of characters telling each other things in a pub. The respect we owe to the real-life models for these characters inhibits their full dramatic realisation in this play.

And while it's unfair to compare a radio drama with a Hollywood movie, it's hard not to compare and contrast this play's use of the Buffalo Bill show with similar scenes in The Assassination of the Outlaw Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. In that film, the nightly recreation of Jesse James's death on stage directly engages the theatre audience, who are implictly part of the outlaw's legend. Jesse James is already a celebrity when the movie starts - a man whose dime book adventures are more real than his actual exploits in the shrinking wild west.

But in Bearing the Cross, Buffalo Bill's show is only used to provide a platform for exposition of the battle. We're given just one character - Martha, the barmaid - who unequivocally approves of the soldiers' VCs and sees the medals as tokens of the community's regard for its heroes. A Kipling poem is used throughout the play to point up the ironies around society's use and abuse of its armed forces. And the only one of the soldiers who seems completely sure of the rightness of his and his comrades' actions will go on, we learn at the end, to commit suicide. The case for the establishment isn't put with much vigour, so the play ends up sounding like a long argument with an absent antagonist.

William Jones VC ...... Nigel Anthony

Robert Jones VC ...... Sebastian Harcombe

Henry Hook VC ...... Jon Strickland

Landlord/Buffalo Bill ...... Robert Blythe

Barmaid ...... Bethan Walker

Original music by David Chilton

Directed by Gordon House at Goldhawk Essential and broadcast on Friday 7 August 2009 at 14:15 on BBC Radio 4

Review: Three in a Bed by Ewa Banaszkiewicz and Mateusz Dymek

Raunchy! Turning-22 Gemma, an editorial dogsbody, inserts herself into the lives of literary liggers Sarah and Tom. Is she the daughter they couldn't have, or the new lover they need to reboot their relationship?

Warped, touching and realistically unresolved, Three in a Bed is a mature and sophisticated piece that tackles some of those "...ever after" issues that most stories steer clear of. For Sarah, there's the challenge of living every day in the light of her childlessness, while Gemma has been rejected by her own mother with casual but sustained cruelty. Life, as we know, goes on, even after the worst personal tragedies - and this, the writers suggest, is how it goes on: messily.

The neediness of Gemma, Sarah and Tom is overt, while their secrets need extraction. This is true to life, in that people's more extreme behaviour often seems to be desperately signalling some kind of pain that those around them can't intuit. Despair and addiction (if only to some form of distraction) are never very far away from these characters who have lost their anchors, and their maps.

This play asks if we can substitute for the broken relationships we can't mend. The writers have no neat answer to this question: the message is that our search for completion will dictate our actions, and that understanding the forces that drive us towards each other may help us heal, if only a little, and a little at a time.

Bold, contemporary writing, together with a great cast propelled by Annabelle Dowler's Gemma, and careful sound design, combine to create a very real world where tragedies must be borne despite the brittle, trivial style of our everyday interactions.

Sarah ...... Anastasia Hille

Tom ...... Matthew Marsh

Gemma ...... Annabelle Dowler

Kira/Tasha ...... Lizzy Watts

Sebastian Murray ...... Philip Fox

Caterer ...... Benjamin Askew

Directed by Sally Avens and broadcast on Monday 10 August 2009 at 14:15 on BBC Radio 4.

Review: Orson Welles's Mutiny on the Bounty

One of the legends of radio drama (or possibly the only legend of radio drama) is Orson Welles's notorious production of The War of the Worlds, which supposedly convinced listeners that the US was actually experiencing a Martian invasion.

Another of Welles's radio pieces has resurfaced, thanks to audio drama podcasters The Sonic Society. Subscribe to The Sonic Society, download the latest episode entitled "Shadowlands", wander along to around 12:30, and you'll find Orson Welles presenting, starring in, and talking about, his radio version of Mutiny on the Bounty. It's a reminder that, once upon a time, drama was all over the radio in the States, with distinguished theatrical types lending their talents to a very popular form.

Hindsight creates some odd distancing effects when listening to archive broadcasts. In this case, the three verbose ads for Campbell's chicken soup seem bizarre and even surreal, given the flash-forward mental imagery of Warhol's appropriation of Campbell's cans. And although Welles doesn't voice the ads, it's hard not to imagine him standing by, with no inkling of his own future role flogging sherry on the telly.

The play is presented in a style that mixes courtroom statements with dramatised scenes. This makes for a lot of framing, creating an effect a little like a pageant. Welles, as Captain Bligh, rages marvellously at the milder and deeper Fletcher Christian, played by Joseph Cotton. The other characters have lesser roles, and Christian's Tahitian lover is predictably presented as a childlike "native".

The surprise of the production is the coda where Welles conducts a scripted interview with an amateur radio enthusiast from Queens. After a tortuous introduction built around a pun on "ham", Welles and the lady from Queens explain that Fletcher Christian's descendants on Pitcairn Island are suffering from lack of food and medical supplies, and urgently need help. This sudden shift from the historical to the contemporary, and the involvement of a non-professional in the broadcast, would be unlikely on radio today, where genre boundaries are rather strictly obeyed. Welles's gambit moved to TV, where connections of this kind are now common.

I was left pondering what it means to be cast adrift - two hundred years ago, fifty years ago, or today. The Pitcairn Islanders resurface in the international news every so often: abandonment is inevitably their leitmotif (even though it was Bligh who was cast adrift, not Christian). But the weird psychology of Captain Bligh remains less easy to stereotype, or to explain. Welles maintains the mystery of the man while successfully recreating the sense of the random terror of his reign aboard the Bounty.

Review: Normal and Nat by Debbie Oates

Nat is in the first year of her GCSEs, but the voices she's always heard in her head are beginning to get in her way. She's not crazy, but she is being seriously distracted. Does she need pills, or understanding?

Luckily, Nat meets Miss Davies, a temporary music teacher who brings new life to the type we've all known: the inspiring teacher who managed to connect with our concerns without patronising us or telling us what to do. The school's headmaster seems to be more worried about an upcoming inspection than the challenges faced by his pupils - a general pattern of management behaviour that's become familiar in contemporary drama. Nat's mum and (absent) dad contrast with each other, Jane being short on patience and anxious to embrace medication on Nat's behalf, and Paul more inclined to take an exploratory approach to Nat's condition.

But it's the young people who create - and solve - Nat's real problems. Social acceptance and romance scuttle down the corridor when there's any suggestion that someone is visiting the school counsellor's office, and, although this isn't directly commented on, Nat's absence from school for some weeks must help to increase her sense of isolation. Through the power of music, and specifically Nat's newly discovered talent for arranging music, the school choir transforms into a truly creative musical force that allows the young people's talents and enthusiasms shine through. There's rapping, too.

The harmonising voices that Nat hears are carefully calibrated to disturb without seeming absurd - a tricky balance that's preserved by the director's refusal to overuse the technique and thereby make it a gimmick.

Normal and Nat could easily be an "issue play" littered with slick life lessons and easy-to-swallow mental health awareness caplets. But by choosing to show the prejudice of Nat's mother without correcting it, and by showing the continuing distrust shown to people with mental health issues via Miss Davies' experience, Debbie Oates manages to keep the story real.

Nat ...... Rebecca Ryan

Miss Davies ...... Elizabeth Berrington

Mix ...... Jamil Thomas

Shanice ...... Wunmi Mosaku

Jane ...... Sue Devaney

Paul/HeadteacherDavid Fleeshman

Pianist ...... Jonathan Scott

The Voice in Nat's Head ...... Emma Johnson

With Chorlton High School Choir and The RNCM Gospel Choir.

Directed in Manchester by Nadia Molinari and broadcast on Thursday 6 August 2009 at 14:15 on BBC Radio 4.

Link: Spectator review of Andy McNab's Last Night, Another Soldier...

Kate Chisholm reviews Andy McNab's first play for radio, Last Night, Another Soldier..., about the war in Afghanistan, in The Spectator:

"To tune in to an artificial drama about something that is actually taking place as we listen is disquieting rather than instructive."

Review: The Tower by Richard Monks

Eva, a young Romanian, gets a cleaning job at The Tower, a motorway service station somewhere in the middle of middle England. When she notices music emanating from a parked lorry, she inadvertantly blows the cover of Mashama, a stowaway fleeing persecution in Zimbabwe. Setting out to help Mashama, Eva risks her job and - once dodgy chef Neil finds out what she's doing - her personal safety.

The British characters in the play are variously glib, venal, shallow, rude and self-absorbed in ways that make Mashama's nobility somewhat easily earned. The ease of our lives contrasts painfully with the situation Mashama has left behind, although the employees of The Tower treat the very real possibility of its imminent closure by management rather lightly.

Eva chooses, in the end, to return home and look after her sick mother. I'm pretty sure this is the same choice made by Magda, a Polish guest-worker, in John Godber and Jane Thornton's Dreaming in English (Afternoon Play, 14 September 2007, repeated 28 January 2009). I wanted both Eva and Mashama to confront British ignorance and complaceny more than they did. Mashama, in particular, seems to melt away amidst an orchestral invasion of the service station.

But perhaps this failure of connection between Britain and two representatives of "abroad" is the point of the story. Eva and Mashama have a common bond, although they can also criticise each other. There's no real meeting of minds between Eva and her workmates, despite Carol's apparent openness and level-headedness. There's also a sense that the British culture on display has been diluted and corporatised into nothing: it's all brainstorming and broken condom machines.

The service station is peculiarly quiet too. The Tower is a haven of peace compared to the services I use regularly, but perhaps I'm just driving the wrong roads. Or perhaps I'm just not paying attention to the lives of people like Eva and Mashama - people who disappear in the cracks of our inward-looking society.

Eva ...... Cristina Catalina

Mashama ...... Lucian Msamati

Neil ...... Stephen Hogan

Carol ...... Lorraine Ashbourne

Crosby ...... John Lightbody

Geoff ...... John Hollingworth

Denise ...... Annabelle Dowler

Driver ...... David Hargreaves

Directed by Sally Avons and broadcast on Wednesday 5 August 2009 at 14:15 on BBC Radio 4.

Review: Ladies' Day by Amanda Whittington

It's Gold Cup day at Cheltenham races, which apparently is the day after Ladies' Day, but who's counting? Pearl and her workmates Jan and Shelley are on a girls' day out, and they each have an admission to make.

This is an amiable play that keeps our attention by witholding the women's secrets and bringing each character to life as an an individual with real life experiences and attitudes. Pearl is on a secret mission, Jan's rationalisation of her non-sex life is due for a critique, and Shelley has a fateful appointment with the truth. The tone is light and funny, while sailing close to home truths - the kind of style that Debbie Horsfield does so well on TV (Making Out, Cutting It).

Pearl and Jan meet their challenges almost incidentally, as if they are ready to reveal material about themselves on this particular day, whereas Shelley has an encounter with a creepy commentator which prompts her transformation. The seeming lack of impetus to change in Pearl and Jan isn't all that noticeable though, because we're quickly caught up in the progress of the races - the women have an accumulator bet and their horses keep winning.

This version of Ladies' Day was adapted from a stage play produced by Hull Truck Theatre.

Pearl ...... Katharine Rogers

Jan ...... Lynda Rooke

Shelley ...... Louise Kempton

Kevin ...... John McAndrew

Jack ...... Robert Gwilym

Announcer ...... Charlie Parkin

Directed in Bristol by Sara Davies and broadcast on Wednesday 29 July 2009 at 14:15 on BBC Radio 4.

Review: Forty-Three Fifty-Nine Assassins by John Dryden and Mike Walker

Wondering where all the high-concept flicks have gone? Frustrated that no one takes any risks with storytelling any more? Hankering for a rich, realistic story world that completely immerses you? You need to listen to Forty-Three Fifty-Nine Assassins.

At the time of posting, the play is available for another 6 days on the BBC iPlayer. Then it'll doubtless disappear for many, many years - until the industry wakes up, rewrites its contracts, and starts to exploit the incredible wealth of archived radio drama.

Where to start? Well, 4359A isn't content with having one potentially great story to tell - there's an abundance. We meet Henry, a hit man born into a firm of "family butchers" stretching back three or four generations, visiting a seaside town on a job. Henry is with his daughter Cath, but their strange dialogue tells us there's something very wrong here - something weirder than the very idea of a family company of killers. Father and daughter seem to be telling each other stuff they already know, with Cath in particular hitting a number of symbolic statements right on the nose. When Henry meets his vic, Bryant, Cath becomes mysteriously silent - and we start to realise that all is not well in Henry's head.

Here the story gives birth to another two potential stories, like a Russian doll unpacking. Bryant is a fallen City financier, living in luxury but also hounded by the media. There's potential here to run with the theme of the credit crunch, bankers' bonuses and so on, but this idea isn't allowed to take over the main plot line. At the same time, with Henry pretending to be a surveyor from the housing department investigating a planning application, everything goes a little "Grand Designs" for a few minutes.

And then the most surprising thing happens - well, it's surprising for the Afternoon Play slot. It goes on for about a minute, it's very messy, and it's not sex.

Now Bryant's daughter Angela turns up, and Henry reinvents himself as a policeman. Cath has meanwhile briefly reappeared, advising and helping Henry with the clean-up. Angela manages to escape and there's a final chase - in the sea. Henry, the poorer swimmer, is defeated. Or is he?

Let's enumerate the risks that the makers of this fine play have taken. They've got characters who may or not be real. Characters don't stay throughout the piece, and the character who faces the major challenge, Angela, doesn't appear until the last act. Several potential stories are referenced, but no single theme is insisted on. And, to add a technical risk, the play is recorded on location.

The makers pull off all of these challenges. The play is impossible to second-guess, and hard to categorise, as a result. It's fresh but taps into several established genres - primarily filmic ones. There's a connection with Brighton Rock, and not just because it's set in an English seaside town: sin, redemption and a certain Greenelandic thriller tone infuse the play. There's also a flavour of the noirish, B-movie sensibilities of James M Cain here, and, when Henry and Cath talk about ice creams, a hint of that habit Tarantino swiped from Elmore Leonard where the bad guys obsess about trivia.

There's one more risk the makers take. Angela has locked herself in a bedroom, but is working her way out before she drops thirty feet to the beach and makes for the sea. The play's point of view, which has been solely Henry's up until now, switches to Angela. This is partly so we can hear Angela escaping - which is done entirely with sound, rather than expository dialogue. But as we hear Henry pounding on the door, spinning more lies, we suddenly see him for what he is: a relentless and amoral killer. We'd been tricked into thinking of him as a devoted father, and been impressed at his improvisation skills, but now we see him through the victim's eyes.

4359A is proof that you can do weird, bloody and topical on radio in the afternoon. It's proof that you can make a radio play with the impact of a movie. It's an indie film for your ears, made by an indie company, commissioned by the BBC. Listen to it if you can.

Henry ...... Rob Jarvis

Bryant ...... Nicholas Farrell

Angela ...... Emily Beecham

Cathy ...... Meghan Haggerty

A Goldhawk Essential production broadcast on Monday 3 August 2009 at 14:15 on BBC Radio 4.

Review: Antimacassars and Ylang Ylang Conditioner by Ian Potter

Ian Potter's engaging play is the bittersweet story of eightysomething Frank, whose day goes wrong when he sets out to buy vital supplies - a jar of coffee, and a marker pen to help him catch whoever's been helping themselves. It quickly becomes clear that Frank's a little confused, and that both his dog-ferrying neighbour "Mrs Johnson" and Dave the road digger are familiar with his rapidly shifting moods.

But Frank's vulnerability isn't overegged in a story that subtly defends the dignity of older people without preaching, or reaching for the sentimentality hose. And, intriguingly, the vulnerability of the young is an equally strong theme. When Frank is targeted by two schoolboys who need to raise some cash in a hurry, we worry about his entrapment - but we feel as much for the moral limitations of the lads. If it's difficult being old, it's difficult being young too.

The plot takes us on a journey that covers only a small geographical distance, but which deftly suggests Frank's entire life and his attitudes to change. The play also manages to convey a real sense of the physical experience of age, partly of course through Russell Dixon's spirited performance, but also through the constant presence of Frank's shopping basket on wheels - a prop in more than the theatrical sense.

Frank ...... Russell Dixon

Ewan ...... Stephen Hoyle

Nick ...... Reece Noi

Mrs Johnson ...... Sue Ryding

Shopkeeper ...... Balvinder Sopal

Dave ...... Greg Wood

Jiri/Rob ...... Matt McGuirk

Directed in Manchester by Gary Brown and broadcast on Monday 27 July 2009, 14:15 on BBC Radio 4.