Review: For the Love of Leo by Michael Chaplin, Episode 1

For the Love of Leo by Michael Chaplin promises to be an intriguing and engaging series. I’ve only listened to Episode 1 so far, an opening which makes deft use of the genre flexibility and tonal freedom of radio drama. It’s hard to pigeonhole this series – and that’s a real strength.

What kind of narrative beast is this? It could be a comedy. Leo’s mother, who is introduced early on, is talkative and funny. She is fond of making allusions and criticising other characters in ways that align her with the harmless but amusing next-door neighbour character often found in sitcoms. But when Leo talks to his absent daughter Laura over the web both characters express raw grief at their recent bereavement. It’s a surprising turn. The death of Leo’s wife Tamsin suddenly seems real rather than merely a pretext for a comedy of manners. And we now seem to be in the territory of family drama.

Then when Leo accepts an invitation from Tamsin’s business partner Margot to play golf, we seem to be pivoting back towards the comedy genre and perhaps even romantic comedy. Yet this is also the part of the story where Leo begins to question the circumstances of Tamsin’s death. As he wonders why Tamsin was in the area where her fatal car accident occurred, Leo seems to be leading us into the thriller genre. And Margot seems less like comic relief and more like a potential villain. These genre crossovers are further put into doubt by the status of the Sadie character, a young woman who comes to clean Leo’s flat and seems unduly moved at the sight of Leo’s portrait of Tamsin.

Do we believe in Leo as a linchpin character around whom events will revolve? Is he a romantic lead? Or is he going to turn out to be an amateur detective? We are so used to rigid consistency of tone in visual drama that the shifts in register that happen in this episode keep us off-kilter. The BBC offers ‘funny’, ‘sad’ and ‘wry’ – quite a mix.

It’s a measure of the strength of Michael Chaplin’s writing that these questions of genre and tone deepen the grip of the drama rather than distracting from the narrative. He also provides necessary exposition in efficient and unobtrusive ways. A great deal of contextual and historical information is presented in this first episode, rapidly creating a tangible world of potentially conflicting character motivations and a rich emotional palette.

Leo is a painter who is unable to paint. This is no paint-by-numbers drama: it is shaping up to be a subtle and compelling story. I’ll return to it when I’ve listened to the complete series.

For the Love of Leo is directed by Marilyn Imrie and is a Catherine Bailey production for BBC Radio 4.